saints and jaguars

In trying to find today the exhibit of retratos at the Smithsonian up and down stairs, past fountains, and through little nooks and rooms of statues and jewelry we ran into others similarly lost: when we all together finally found the exhibit we were like the Katamari Damarcy ball rolling on in, legs and arms hats and scarves unfurling into collective murmur at the color and life on the walls.

So, like, for me, when it comes to portraits, painting beats out photography just about every time. I will be William Morris's great-great-niece, listing after craft and handwork.

The effort of hands trying to record a face, present in any painting, means that someone was thinking and making choices about what mattered about a face (which a portrait photographer certainly does) but then also making what mattered have the presence of paint. You have to decide what of eyes and nose and eyebrows and pinched lips should have most emphasis, and what color, and what color relative to the other pieces, and how to make it all work together? I like the paintings where you can see the paint slicked on, where the mouth isn't a flat red round but is built instead of quick and brushstrokes. You can see someone's hands in there, moving, pushing. The face that results belongs therefore to at least two people, to the painter and to the model -- as well as to whatever tastes and agreements, arguments, beliefs, varnish, and distrust passed between and around them while they faced each other.

And that's what made the paintings in this exhibit even hotter, the breathable tensions between the Latin and the American. The exhibit was laid out chronologically, and so first there are the portraits -- the little sculptures that can travel -- from the Olmec, the Maya, and the Moche, and then there's the overlay of the European culture that erases the little clay works from having the status of art, replacing them with tall stiff men in uniforms and women buried in lace; but then eventually -- by the nineteenth century -- the life of the little clays can't be pretended away anymore and it starts erupting through the European habits of painted portrait. The colors become hotter, and the painted nuns are delirious in their weddings and deaths, flowers sloughing around them and bloody emblems of saints on their chests; the nuns close their eyes a little but still focus directly and with a little reproach on whoever is looking. There's a priest in sunglasses and black cap from 1853 who looks mean, fleshy, and curious. There's a woman clutching a bunch of roses who looks like she should have a pack of cigarettes also, to share, her face a little falling away from the bone and the stark dark background. There's a man who saved others from a shipwreck, his face resistant to exuberance but unerasable. And, of course, there's a Frida Kahlo painting that could fly away on her twitching eyebrows.

The devaluation of handwork that started in the late eighteenth century has not been about just farm and other mechanical labor; it is only in the last fifteen years or so that painting has been allowed to be representational again in the judgments of the fast grabby New York scene, that the efforts of the learned craft of drawing have not been put down in favor of concept, video, and performance/installation. I am not -- could not be -- arguing that concept, video, performance, installation, and the digital are worse or better than representational painting. They all do different work; they have their own contexts and technological possibilities.

But I want to remember faces, and -- because of them -- the stuff that people do for, with, and against each other. Maybe it is just my education and what I've made on my own time that leans me toward being enthralled with the painted faces of others, but, holy last day of 2005, those paintings peopled those basement rooms and made me smell flesh, loving, lemons, and the intensities of sex and hate. The ride back to the hotel on the Metro was not petals on some black bough; Dennis had to tell me to stop staring and to quiet down the stories I was making up about other lives. It's the hands, I tell you, the hands in the paint. They are around my throat and brain, and it's all good.

ah, the MLA

My report on the MLA will be different than many but not most others, since whatever East Coast flu I picked up seems to be well and miserably shared. I left the hotel room for nothing other than the panel I chaired and the one on which I ramblingly presented a nineteenth-centuried defense of blogging. (I should not be allowed to partake in Q&A when I am sick; the switch to my brain-mouth connection was malfunctioning because of the fever.)

I ate oatmeal with Halls Mentholyptus crumbled on top. I drank tea. I listened to the hourly switch of interviewees in the room across the hall. I came in and out of consciousness throughout a movie about giant spiders menacing David Arquette. I watched the pumpkin battle on Iron Chef. I left big tips for the people who graciously gave us new sheets and towels every day and who brought the oatmeal and clucked gently over my red nose. I fantasized about the interviews across the hallway, imagining the perfect and the horriblest possible events (which eventually involved David Arquette). And when I did have to go out I tried not to shake hands with all the other people dressed in black but if someone insisted I sneezed on their shoulders.

I am become water. Dennis keeps me supplied in Puffs Plus and the memory (and promise) of healthy summers at the lake.

THREE kinds of pierogi

My brother Paul manages just fine. The latest manifestation of this is the house where he and Anna now live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The main part of the house is a 17th century mansion -- huge entry hall, big fireplace rooms on either side, wide swaying staircase, many mazed rooms upstairs -- with a later-ly added kitchen wing. Oh, and the Bay, right there, as the front yard.

We drove to the house down a long, tree-lined drive, away from Route 50, which is no longer the double-lane rural highway of our Ocean City-directed youth. Paul and Anna are watching over this place while the property around it is developed into what the Eastern Shore is developing into. I think Paul and Anna would rather have the run of this place -- where for now their telescope works just fine -- without the development, but I also think they will happily be there with the Bay and the house echoes for as long as they can.

And we did manage to add to the echoes: almost the whole family was there Christmas Eve, Anna having made a traditional 12-course Christmas Eve meal. The big kitchen was all Wysockis and Wysockis-by-social-attachment, raucous, hungry, and silly. Lots of nieces, some of whom peeled away at various times to wander quietly in the dark upstairs seeking evidence of romantic life from the past: crinoline, servant buttons, brain fever. (Leading to a conversation about the side of the buttons on which we -- the family of potato farmers we all assume ourselves to be -- would have been. Would still be, without the trust in education to which my parents still cheerfully and respectfully adhere.) Not so many nephews, led by Paul's son David with his new Christmas camera that he cleverly fitted with a homemade light bounce to ease up on the flash.

But dinner.

Wild mushroom soup. Borscht. Goose. Cod with pistachio crust. Cabbage, red and green. Breads, stuffed and buttered. And three kinds of pierogi. Three kinds of pierogi. Three kinds of pierogi. My father would have been smiling wildly if he had not been so happily eating: this is his idea of what life should always be, him surrounded by his children and their children, and the remembered food of his grandmother's kitchen. My mother liked the more boisterous scene of the kitchen before and after, lots of hands involved (but never enough, and too often female) in the cooking and clean up but also lots of children and conversation swirling in between the pots, butter, hot water, and bourbon.

My memory of the evening will always be a bit feverish because I was, well, feverish or building up to it. Everyone there from out of state -- with the exception of Dennis who had gotten his flu shot -- came down that evening with something hallucinatory. When we got back to the house we were house-sitting, I sank into bed with the dogs and did not get out until two days later when he had to leave for the MLA. The two little dogs pushed up against me, happy for the extra warmth, and I slipped in and out of fever dreams about pierogi, paisley, and presenting the paper I had been asked to give.

Dennis, bless him, went to my parents yesterday and did all the cooking that we do for them as our present whenever we are there on Christmas. He put together the huge afternoon buffet himself, with help from Amanda niece, while my mother made her famous date bars. And so a late Merry Christmas to you all.

lunch with Martha, Jenna, and Marina

Good heavens but some of my family inherited some smart and beauty genes from somewhere. We met my sister Martha and her two daughters for lunch on Main Street in Annapolis, at one of the now several sushi restaurants (the presence of which of course makes all of us comment about how exciting it was when the blasted crepes restaurant opened up back we were in high school, bringing some whiff of someplace else to town). The three of them are standing in front of the restaurant waiting for us, and our eyes swoon. Jenna is elegant and composed. Marina has on a bright yellow and green cropped wig. Their faces glitter and in the restaurant we get shown to the back corner table where we can all huddle and start laughing and don't stop. Edamame, a tray of fish, some rolls, seaweed salad, fruit, a few beers -- anything to make the afternoon last forever.

we luck out

>

My sister has arranged for us to house sit for people she knows, people who live in what from the street looks like a non-descript thirties era Annapolis house. They have completely rebuilt the inside of the house, however, filling the creek-side walls with huge windows. The house is on Spa Creek, in a part of town where I did some high school hanging out. To come back here in the winter is immediately to run up against the optimistic melancholy of those years I spent with Ellie, Susan, Kimi, talking about boys and clothes, college and homework... the limited view of the future we had. We were outside a lot, under the trees or in the little storage sheds, garages, and boat houses where no one thought to look for us (or else where no one bothered looking for us because they didn't think we could make enough trouble to undermine our sliding into our underimagined futures).

The overall grey -- the possibility of snow -- contributed then and contributes now to my sense that something is just about to happen as long as I sit quietly and let it.

I know now how much these houses cost, and the distance in value between the house on the creek and the house just on the street; back then, we all just knew each other and the different houses hadn't been so separately fixed up. Dennis and I go walking through the neighborhood, taking the two little dogs for whose exercise we are responsible. We pass the house where, in high school, we mourned Ned's death into the night, a bunch of kids who -- most of us -- would need more than one death to persuade us that time was neither endless nor always remarkable.

Tonight we have dinner with Laurie and John, and those words should have confetti skittling up around them.

much better

New York Avenue heading northeast, Washington, DC. I know this road well, from, first, family trips to the Smithsonian and then, later, late night high school trips with friends into Georgetown and movies (until I learned they were "films"). In the morning, in the car with my sweetie, after breakfast, on the way back to (what was) my little hometown, there is nothing to do but play the radio loud and grin. A sort of vacation is starting, time to hang with the nieces and nephews, my sisters, see how the parents are once more, a little bit on from last time.

where are we?

The natives do not wear clothing any different from us, nor is their breakfast food different. The built outside our windows offer nothing locally particular. With regularity, planes pass behind the buildings, landing or taking off. The only more disorienting scene right now would be in a mall, in front of a Gap.

the temptation is to leap

On planes we doze in between there and here, wondering what it would be to be in that air, hovering and with a much larger sternum, breathing.

We are off to Maryland, to visit my parents, sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, and then on to the MLA.

According to the Mining Gazette...

... we have had about 115" of snow so far this year, which is more than usual. It looks like mid-January out there.

People are having to shovel off their roofs already: the black smudge on the old train station above is someone pushing off the snow.

The pile of snow to the left is from plowing the parking lot. I think our Constitution is under it. I'd like to see a whole lot of sun.

looking toward our house

Kristin and I met at the Cyberia today (we miss the Motherlode) to talk about her upcoming MLA interviews. I had hoped to get my hair trimmed afterwards, so I crossed the street to the little salon on the corner, but they were booked up -- but Cynthia was there with Christian, who was getting the second official hair cut of his life and was being quite noble. I walked back down to the car, started it and all the heater and defrosting systems at full blast, and the sun came out and there was some blue sky for a few moments. I took this picture from the Library parking lot of the Quincy Smelter back across the Portage. Our house is to the left, masquerading as a pine tree. The clouds came back quickly. As I was on my way back home across the bridge, the SnoGo was cutting into the banks on the bridge, pouring the snow it was collecting into the dump truck that moved slowly alongside it, blocking both lanes. Two logging trucks were first in line behind the tandem snow removal equipment.

What this has to do with hair, I don't know either.

Phyllis has in her dining room a very small glass cabinet that she got from her aunt's hair salon.

today, it blew

We picked up some of our last Christmas/Holiday/Solstice gifts today. There's a new gift/housewares store on a Hancock side street, in an old house, where we bought pillows (made by Liz) for B&B, and then we went up to North Wind Books where we bought books of local photography for my brothers, with local being inclusive of anything that overlaps with the distinctive qualities of here, such as snow architecture, small old cabins, and northern Minnesota.

The sun was out and the wind was kicking up the snow.

We made it to UPS with minutes to spare.

Oh! Denaturalization!

When I was a kid, we put tinsel on our Christmas tree and other people would hang lights from the eaves of their houses to look like icicles. (We didn't at our house, because for quite a while we lived in an apartment building on the Naval Academy.) It was all just part of Christmas.

Now I know what it was we were all trying to re-create.

That's neither tinsel nor light-strings hanging from our eaves.

In which I re-acquaint myself, for a time, with Crisco

Since the first winter we were here, I've been going to an annual Cookie Party that Phyllis Fredendall hosts. Everyone brings a dozen cookies for each of the other party-attendees.

And so this morning I got up and started baking, using materials and equipment that I rarely use any other day of the year. I made 8 dozen of the cookies I have been making regularly for quite some time, Ginger Moons from the China Moon cook book. And then I tried to make an equivalent amount of a new recipe.

If you ever get tempted to make this recipe, know that the recipe is not accurate: you need not simply to "combine" the egg whites and vanilla, you need to *beat* the egg whites and vanilla into stiff peaks before folding them into the cocoa, sugar, and walnuts. If you do not beat the egg whites, the dough isn't dough, it's runny, and it is impossible to get the cookies off their baking sheets, whether the sheets are covered with wax paper, wax paper and Crisco, or Crisco alone. You can't get them off with a dough scraper. You can't get them off with a knife. You can't get them off with running-behind words of nasty despair and Oprah-deprecation.

If you do beat the egg whites (if you have enough ingredients to make another batch starting 15 minutes before you are supposed to be at the party because you just lost an hour trying to excavate cookies from wax paper), then the cookies slide cheerily off the Criscoed baking sheets.

The cookies are good -- whether in their crumbed or whole state. (I did not take pictures of the chocolate cookies, only the ginger cookies. The ginger cookies are damn tasty, if you like ginger.)

The Cookie Party is always easy to slide into. We laugh, a lot, especially when Harriet describes what it took her to bake her cookies. (This year, there's a lost snake and piss-smelling baking chocolate involved.) Because I arrived late this year, I missed partaking in a major decision, which is that the cookie party will continue next year -- just without the cookies.

...
There are two aspects to the cookie party that, even though I've been going since 1992, remain un-home-like to me.

First, there is a tension in the production of cookies. I have never been a baker of sweets. Sometimes, irregularly, I bake bread or pies, but never cookies. The weird business with cookies is the ordered repetition. In an hour one can make, if one has an electric beater, 8 dozen rolled and cut cookies with chocolate-chips, cut in half, as eyes. (This does not include the 4 or 5 sequential 15-minute-each oven bakings for the trays of dough.) For efficent dough use, one tries to cut as many cookies as possible out each sheet of the rolled dough. For efficient baking, the raw cookies ought to be arranged evenly and linearly on the cookie sheets. But in order to look like the hand-produced little objects that they are, the cookies have to have a little unevenness to them. The halves of chocolate chips help here: some of the cookies end up looking heavy-lidded, while others look a little stunned. The dough also puffs a little unevenly, so that some of the cookies have full cheeks. As I am moving just-baked cookies onto the cooling rack, especially since the Cookie Party is always in only an hour or two, I have to avoid getting caught in their personalities. Besides, they are only to be eaten. But they are uneven little faces, each of the 8 dozen of them.

Second, there is the business of Cookie Parties. I grew up on the coasts, and I never heard of cookie parties -- but I had been in Houghton for only 4 months before I was invited to one. Family Reunions are also a big deal here -- a Midwest business? The Cookie Party clearly has a very functional purpose: because it is easiest to focus on just one or two kinds of cookies yourself, it is a treat then to trade them for lots of other kinds of cookies (which one then gives to the neighbors as a sign of Christmas neighborliness). But all of this means that baking cookies -- baking massive amounts of cookies, using massive amounts of sugar, butter, chocolate, eggs, and time -- is an expected part of Christmas, so that someone some time in a womanly and aproned past was thinking about how to achieve a wide assortment as efficiently as possible and came up with the idea of Cookie Parties.

you were wondering about the tree?

while listening to the Messiah

When he was little, my brother Phillip used to cry at certain pieces of music. At church, I'd look over and tears would be flowing along his cheeks; he was 4 or 5. It didn't have to be something big like the Messiah, but none of us ever sat him down and played him our records systematically to figure out what touched him even though we were enough insensitive as big sisters and brothers to have tried it -- we just weren't sufficiently organized or empirical. Vocal music usually didn't do it, that much I remember. Given our familial quietness about emotional events, it makes sad sense that, after he got older, we never talked about it, he and I. I think Walter and I might have talked about it at the funeral, after tequila; I might have mentioned it in the eulogy, thinking of Phillip standing in the sun after biking, glowing.

I miss Phillip.

blog to the rescue

I post the last entry, scroll down to look at what I'd already forgotten, and there at December 5 is a picture of the sleds.

I can step into Dennis's Sorels without having to bend over even, and still in what passes for my pajamas, a random assorment of fleece and flannel, I go up to that part of the yard. The snow is up to *my* knees and falls into the Sorels, which gape open a bit because they are so big. Within two minutes of kicking and digging (why didn't I put on gloves?) I find both sleds.

Happiness abounds.

oh, did I tell you: it's snowing?

There's a knock on the downstairs door. While I'm going down the stairs I'm looking out the window and can see no tracks in the path from the street to our door. It's because at the door is one of the littler neighbor boys from the apartment building down on the corner, and he's come from the opposite direction.

"Do you know where our sleds are?," he asks.
I do not laugh.

"I know they are out there somewhere," I say. "I think the snowboard is between the birch tree and that pine tree," pointing.

"But we want the orange sled."

"Gee, I just really don't remember where I saw that last. It might have been up at the top of the hill, but it might have also been down in the trees. I'm sorry -- I just really don't remember."

Every few minutes we call out to him in encouragement.

He's still there, twenty minutes later. That's him in the picture above, bent over a likely looking bump in the snow.

And now the even littler boy -- with a cough -- has joined him. The snow comes up almost to mid-thigh on him. He trudges a bit, then throws himself down and swings his hands and legs.

Our hill is now a random meander of boy trails, with occasional body plants.

5pm, Houghton Canal

11 am, other front door

8 am, front door

from each according to her abilities

That’s Dr. Ball to you!

Today, Cheryl walked. What a pleasure it was.

Here they are, the Scientific & Technical Communication grads of Fall 2005

Mark Bildeaux, Catherine Lewis, Paul Smith, Rayna Rivard, and Craig Stancher -- congratulations!

And Jacob -- we missed you!

Friday night

We went to Marilyn's for dinner. We played with Pegeen, coated our insides with duck mousse, and watched Bambi.

No wonder certain people long for the imaginary days of the family: Bambi has beautifully painted mattes and is very comforting in its colors, with no plot except for the hunters who bring fire and death, the dead mother, the relentless heteronormativity, and the absent father but ever present and stifling patriarchy, all of which combined allows for life to repeat through the seasons so cheerily and forgetfully.

sucking up the sun

After a week of snow, the sun makes people giddy. Combine the sun with the very last day of classes for the semester, and you get sleep-deprived giddy singing people stumbling through the drifts.

and today's gift...

Eve flew in last night from Tokyo, and will be flying back too soon.

I will miss this class.

at school

the tree is longer during the day

my own personal jar

Yes, I am looking forward to a while from now looking back and having all my memories of this winter revolve around this tree. It just happened.

the last week of the semester

Everyone in class was goofy today. The people who are graduating look like bobble heads in their excitement. The people who are not graduating look like they have sugar and caffeine instead of blood. It would be hard to tell them apart except that the former group glows.

I took a nap this afternoon because if I hadn't I would be vapor and tissue. Only 350 more pages to proofread. Four permissions issues to fix.

I did finish responding to all the work for class. I am writing this with the handful of words that I did not use up in my responses.

I am using the blog to construct the serene existence that I know underlies this life somewhere. If you are wondering where all the academic-sounding stuff is, it is on all sorts of paper spread all over this room and the next.

oh yeah

Today's view from the front door. There's usually a bunch of mittens piled up on the left-behind sleds, too.

for Sari, for me

Boynton had these two listed, for those times when voices are necessary:

The Norton Anthology of English Literature Archived Audio Readings

The Poetry Archive

(There is also the silence of Poetry Daily.)

looking out the window, contemplating snow wistfully.

Johnny Depp. Samuel L. Jackson. Dennis Lynch.

I need to space out and look out the window for a while.

This is work from people in one of the classes I am teaching. It all needs response before 9:30am tomorrow.

the tree has visitors

We hear them giggling, the boys from the apartment building on the corner. They drag their snowboard and sleds up the hill, but sometimes they just throw themselves bodily back down the hill into the snow and lay there still, laughing or quiet, letting the flakes pile up.

why pronoun reference matters

"If you're too huggy-kissy with them, a male who has not been castrated can turn on you."

said by "Cheryl Ryberg of Avalon, head of the Llama and Alpaca Show Association."

found here.

photoshop realism

http://www.signandsight.com/features/483.html

things to tie in with Manovich, and also surface

more on courts and crime

but with the pleasurable distance of a few centuries. Through the New York Times this morning I found The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London 1674 to 1834, where there are records of over 100,000 criminal trials. If I didn't have 200 more pages to proof of the textbook that will not come to life, I would be there for a few more good hours.

It doesn't take long, however, to find that even over a few centuries not much changes, as with my preceding post:

"There was a French Man also tryed for a Rape; pretended to be Committed on his Maid-Servant, upon the Tryal she gave Evidence that she was one Morning about her business, and her Master arose and as she said took her Virginity from her, being askt what she meant by that, she answered her Maidenhead; but it appearing to the Court, that she had not acquainted any one of it till three days after it was pretended to be done, nor had not accused her Master for it till above three weeks after, he was found not Guilty, and so acquitted."

Man, sexual offences : rape, 29th April, 1674.

And I am back to proofreading, with less lilt and more extended memory.

crap, just crap

Read this -- Judge rules teen filed false report in rape case -- and then for more info and justified anger read Shakespeare's Sister, with links to further blog response, and thank you Twisty.

And why do women constantly second-guess themselves, and worry about being taken seriously? Why do women learn not to speak up?

Crap, just crap.

crap crap crap crap crap crap crap

and bile

it was, of course...

small, close, and dark -- until one looked up through the hole in the roof.

(thinking about Charlie's bed in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [the Johnny Depp version]) (a small children's piece)

Poor Artists Sale Day

Marilyn and I went up to Calumet today for the Poor Artists' Sale and then went over to Vertin's Gallery.

The Poor Artists' Sale is as much quick social event as craft buy. I buy mittens, turn around, and there's Freddi. I buy some funky little cups with bicycles and a bathtub on them for Laurie and Walter, and Sherrie is grabbing a quick hug. Karen is behind the registration table. Over by the cookies, with Kim, Susannah describes her first years working as a lawyer (she was frugal). Andrea's sensual clothes get mixed up in my head with talking with Edith. Viki and Barb stock me up on candles, soaps, and Polish hot sauce. It's a sign of how weird the past year has been that there were a few too many people I hadn't seen since the last sale.

I think it's about time to head down to Ontonagon to go skiing with Sherrie and hear about her upcoming trip to Macchu Picchu and the Galapagos.

and outside, at 2pm

work

A day to be at home with saddening Italian postwar neorealist company in the background while I type (but I am glad [with the cost of heating] that the laptop runs hot).

here we are...

minus Sari (who took the picture), Casey and Roxane and Christy (who left just a few minutes before), Diane (who is sick), and Laurence (who is driving downstate with Betsy).

living with snow

A few inches of snow haphazard the parking lots because no one can see the lines. People use whatever markers they can (like the cart corrals up at Econo or the wheelchair-van signs) to figure out where the lines are supposed to start and how far in to pull a car, but by the time 4 or 5 more cars have used those initial cars as markers, the cars snake around and sometimes people can't back out because the lanes become too narrow and one time up at the movie theater at the mall cars were three deep instead of two and the people with cars in the middle were stuck.

Maybe because we are still in the beginnings of winter, people were driving more slowly today and were patient with each other up at Econo while they waited for others who were trying to push their carts to their cars through the snow or who were trying to back their cars out into the narrowed lanes. I learned that 3pm Thursday is a good time for food shopping: there were few people and no one I knew in the store, unlike last Saturday when we ran into friends in the juice aisle, the beer aisle, by the chocolate, next to the bananas, and while digging into the soy milk case.

I was buying food for tonight's class, which met at our house and was warm. On Tuesday, Roxane had driven down to Rhinelander through the fog, snow, and deer to pick up Heather who couldn't fly in any closer, and she told about getting stopped in Eagle River by a policeman who asked her why she was there and then complimented her on being articulate. Steven and Jill are refinishing the floors in their new house with the help of Nate. Casey has new penguin slippers. Alexa makes dangerous rum balls. Karen has finished the written part of comps. Sunny continued as Sunny. At the end, everyone pile up at the door to put on their boots, coats, gloves and hats and we laughed at how bundled up we all were, with hats that are warm and occasionally stylish and boots that are warm and not.

and outside the other side of the house

The chair is a recliner and the view goes across the Portage to Houghton.

it's snowing