Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
thinking further on Rose
Christine sent along a link to this article "Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage", from the NYT (which I've also pasted in below). For me, considering our reading of Rose, this raises questions:
- The only methodology Rose discussed that has an overtly feminist edge is that of psychoanalytic approaches -- and the feminist sensibilities of such an approach are tied to Lacan, meaning that the ties are always a little uncomfortable. The discourse analysis methodologies Rose discusses are applicable to feminist ends, as demonstrated in the examples she chooses to illustrate the methodologies. Do you think there ought to be a specifically feminist methodology? (As the article Christine linked tells, there have been feminist approached to *art criticism* since Linda Nochlin and Lucy Lippard were just beginning their work. Ought those approaches be more explicitly stretched to criticism of a broader range of visual objects?)
- The article suggests, at least, that visual culture can be questioned through action, performance, and production as well as through criticism and written/spoken discourse -- as per Coco Fusco's presentation and the work of Navjot or the Guerrilla Girls. Your thoughts?
January 29, 2007 -- NYTimes
Feminist Art Finally Takes Center Stage
By HOLLAND COTTER
“Well, this is quite a turnout for an ‘ism,’ ” said the art historian and critic Lucy Lippard on Friday morning as she looked out at the people filling the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art and spilling into the aisles. “Especially in a museum not notorious for its historical support of women.”
Ms. Lippard, now in her 70s, was a keynote speaker for a two-day symposium organized by the museum that was titled “The Feminist Future: Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts.” The event itself was an unofficial curtain-raiser for what is shaping up as a watershed year for the exhibition — and institutionalization, skeptics say — of feminist art.
For the first time in its history this art will be given full-dress museum survey treatment, and not in just one major show but in two. On March 4 “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, followed on March 23 by “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum. (On the same day the Brooklyn Museum will officially open its new Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art and a permanent gallery for “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s seminal proto-feminist work.)
Such long-withheld recognition has been awaited with a mixture of resignation and impatient resentment. Everyone knows that our big museums are our most conservative cultural institutions. And feminism, routinely mocked by the public media for 35 years as indissolubly linked with radicalism and bad art, has been a hard sell.
But curators and critics have increasingly come to see that feminism has generated the most influential art impulses of the late 20th and early 21st century. There is almost no new work that has not in some way been shaped by it. When you look at Matthew Barney, you’re basically seeing pilfered elements of feminist art, unacknowledged as such.
The MoMA symposium was sold out weeks in advance. Ms. Lippard and the art historian Linda Nochlin appeared, like tutelary deities, at the beginning and end respectively; in between came panels with about 20 speakers. The audience was made up almost entirely of women, among them many veterans of the women’s art movement of the 1970s and a healthy sprinkling of younger students, artists and scholars. It was clear that people were hungry to hear about and think about feminist art, whatever that once was, is now or might be.
What it once was was relatively easy to grasp. Ms. Lippard spun out an impressionistic account of its complex history, as projected images of art by women streamed across the screen behind her, telling an amazing story of their own. She concluded by saying that the big contribution of feminist art “was to not make a contribution to Modernism.” It rejected Modernism’s exclusionary values and authoritarian certainties for an art of openness, ambiguity, reciprocity and what another speaker, Griselda Pollock, called “ethical hospitality,” features now identified with Postmodernism.
But feminism was never as embracing and accessible as it wanted to be. Early on, some feminists had a problem with the “lavender menace” of lesbianism. The racial divide within feminism has never been resolved and still isn’t, even as feminism casts itself more and more on a globalist model.
The MoMA audience was almost entirely white. Only one panelist, the young Kenyan-born artist Wangechi Mutu, was black. And the renowned critic Geeta Kapur from Delhi had to represent, by default, all of Asia. “I feel like I’m gate-crashing a reunion,” Ms. Mutu joked as she began to speak, and she wasn’t wrong.
At the same time one of feminism’s great strengths has been a capacity for self-criticism and self-correction. Yet atmospherically the symposium was a very MoMA event, polished, well executed, well mannered, even cozy. A good half of the talks came across as more soothing than agitating, suitable for any occasion rather than tailored to one onto which, I sensed, intense personal, political and historical hopes had been pinned.
Still, there was some agitation, and it came with the first panel, “Activism/Race/Geopolitics,” in a performance by the New York artist Coco Fusco. Ms. Fusco strode to the podium in combat fatigues and, like a major instructing her troops, began lecturing on the creative ways in which women could use sex as a torture tactic on terrorist suspects, specifically on Islamic prisoners.
The performance was scarifyingly funny as a send-up of feminism’s much-maligned sexual “essentialism.” But its obvious references to Abu Ghraib, where women were victimizers, was telling.
In the context of a mild-mannered symposium and proposed visions of a “feminist future” that saw collegial tolerance and generosity as solutions to a harsh world, Ms. Fusco made the point that, at least in the present, women are every bit as responsible for that harshness — for what goes on in Iraq for example — as anyone.
Ms. Kapur’s talk was also topical, but within the framework of India. It is often said that the activist art found in early Western feminism and now adopted by artists in India, Africa and elsewhere has lost its pertinence in its place of origin. Yet in presenting work by two Indian artists, Rummana Hussain (1952-1999) and Navjot Altaf (born in 1949), Ms. Kapur made it clear that they have at least as much to teach to the so-called West as the other way around.
Ms. Hussain, a religious secularist, used images from her Muslim background as a critical response to sectarian violence; Ms. Altaf (known as Navjot), though based in Mumbai, produces art collaboratively with tribal women who live difficult lives in rural India.
Collaborative or collective work of the kind Navjot does has grown in popularity in the United States and Europe in the past few years. And several of the symposium’s panelists — Ms. Lippard, the Guerrilla Girls, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Catherine de Zegher — referred to it as a potential way for feminist art to avoid being devoured and devitalized by an omnivorous art market.
It was Ms. Fusco again who brought utopian dreams to earth. While sympathetic to the idea of collective work as an alternative to the salable lone-genius model, she suggested that the merchandising of art is at present so encompassing, and the art industry so fundamentally corrupted by it, that even collectives tend to end up adhering to a corporate model.
The power of the market, which pushes a few careers and throws the rest out — the very story of feminist art’s neglect — was the invisible subtext to the entire symposium. It was barely addressed, however, nor was the reality that the canonization of feminist art by museums would probably suppress everything that had made the art radical. Certainly no solutions for either problem was advanced, except one, incidentally, by Connie Butler, MoMa’s drawings curator, who is also the curator of the Los Angeles show.
In her panel talk she said that when she was agonizing over what choices of work to make for the “Wack!” exhibition, the art historian Moira Roth suggested, brilliantly, that she just eliminate objects altogether. Instead, Ms. Roth said, why not invite all the artists who made them to come the museum for a group-consciousness-raising session, film the session, and then make the film the show?
Somewhat unexpectedly, signs of a raised consciousness were evident among young people in the MoMA audience, the kind of people we are told either have no knowledge of feminism or outright reject it. In the question-and-answer sessions after each panel, the most passionate, probing and agitating questions and statements came from young women who identified themselves as students or artists.
When they spoke; when Richard Meyer, a gay art historian, spoke about queer feminism; and when Ms. Mutu ended her presentation by simply reading aloud a long list of curators, scholars and artists — all of them women, all of them black — who, could and should have been at the MoMA symposium, I had a sense that a feminist future was, if not secure, at least under vigilant consideration.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
reading Rose
Thank you all for the smart discussion Thursday night: I hope you enjoyed (as I did) the fineness of our talk, the good questions, and the understandings we built around Rose's arguments about visual methodologies. What follows is my memory of our main concerns -- so, please, in the comments, add to / subtract from / take issue with what I've written so that we have as strong a memory together as possible.
The place our discussion took off, it seems to me, is with what happens after Rose's claims that any "critical visual methodology" must do three things: "take images seriously," "think about the social conditions and effects of visual objects," and "consider" the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images." After she sets up those criteria (the latter two of which will come back soon) she describes the "sites" of sighting practices in which "meaning is made" (production / image / audience) and the modalities with which those sites intersect (technological, compositional, and social). We spent our time focusing on the sites and the modalities, and somewhat on their intersections, but we did not have time for asking what the resulting "grid" of intersections implies in terms of the judgments it encourages; I am pretty sure, though, that in the coming weeks, as we explore further some of the methodologies that Rose describes, as well as others, that more questions about the grid -- and what it encourages us to see or overlook, and how it positions us as reflexive viewers-critics, and about other possible configurations for considering visual objects -- will emerge.
You all noted how Rose's sites -- of production / image / audience -- parallel the 'traditional' triad of writing studies, of author / text / audience. We discussed why Rose would use "production" instead of "artist" or "composer," which would parallel the writing studies triad: this is a direct result, it would seem, with her concern that we consider the social conditions and effects of visual objects, such that we do not want to reduce production to an individual person purposefully and intentfully in control of a text. Rose's treatment does not come to production as Foucault's notion of the "author function" does, with the author/composer composed by readers out of and in response to a text (the closest to this would be her discussion of the what the "good eye" does in constructing ideas about great artists); instead, Rose's use of "production" seems aimed at keeping us imagining production as a coming together of a multiply scaled set of social / cultural / political /economic /technological processes.
But then why does she still hold to "audience," which keeps us imagining discrete people? Why does she not use "reception" as the parallel term? Alexa asked if this might be connected to a desire to make "audience" concrete as possible for us, to keep reminding us that this site is indeed real groups of real people responding, so that we do not think of passive reception. I have to admit, though, that "audience" carries precisely that connotation for me, of passivity. So why point us away (rightfully so, I think) from thinking of the producer as a single individual while keeping to the old term for the receivers?
We also asked whether "image" is inclusive enough for what she hopes to achieve, given that the word asks us to imagine static, 2D, realistically representative art works or photographs -- and such works are a tiny subset of the range of visual objects we compose for each other. The word also asks us to think of such work as statically contained, as objects that sit still before us; again, this goes against Rose's other attempts to encourage us toward more dynamic conceptions of processes. Here, for example, is where Christine pointed out the Eurocentricity of this -- and the other -- parts of this system: from her work with local tribal groups and photography, Christine noted that there is no word that captures, as "image" or "photograph" does for us, that sense of a stilled or caught object; she told us how the closest words always mean movement, someone doing something or on the way to somewhere. This, then, is a question we need to raise of the methodologies we consider this semester.
This also leads us into questioning after Rose's emphasis on reflexivity, her insistence that critical methodologies must consider the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images"; this is where Heather and Yang each asked about -- reminding us very appropriately -- of the place of the teacher in relation to the methodologies we teach. For each of the methodologies Rose presents in the book, she raises the objection that it is not or not sufficiently reflexive -- as we are noting that there is reflexivity about larger cultural positioning vis-à-vis historically/culturally developed systems of seeing and talking about seeing and the objects of sight. As our class talked, we realized that her complaints seem related to her grid of sites and modalities: within the grid, the alertness to social positioning that characterizes reflexivity is present for the sites of production and of reception -- but there is no overtly marked place in the grid for the reflexivity that Rose argues ought to accompany the work of the critic. In other words, Rose's grid does not, apparently, allow for there to be a methodological system in which reflexivity is necessarily called forth by the relation of the parts of the grid. If the grid is meant to encompass all the possible components of systems of looking and objects, then the critic -- and hence the critic's reflexivity -- is left out. The critic *could* be considered under audience, as some part of audience: how might the critic/analyst/teacher be woven into a visual methodology so that reflexivity would of necessity be part of the practice?
In addition, Steve wondered whether compositional methodologies are necessarily a part of any methodology that hopes to consider visual objects, since it is compositional methodologies that allow us to say anything about the structure of visual objects. Although Rose seems to dismiss such methodologies as the simplest and least reflexive of the methodologies, we noted that every other methodological approach -- when applied -- starts by describing in the object being analyzed its elements and the relations established between them. Rose's concerns about compositional methodologies ought to whisper behind us as we read for next week, for those readings -- the Donis and Arnheim (as with the Bang) -- are at the core of what many use for compositional analysis (as with Kress and van Leeuwen): are they as concerned with the "good eye" as Rose claims is the central point of compositional analysis?
The place our discussion took off, it seems to me, is with what happens after Rose's claims that any "critical visual methodology" must do three things: "take images seriously," "think about the social conditions and effects of visual objects," and "consider" the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images." After she sets up those criteria (the latter two of which will come back soon) she describes the "sites" of sighting practices in which "meaning is made" (production / image / audience) and the modalities with which those sites intersect (technological, compositional, and social). We spent our time focusing on the sites and the modalities, and somewhat on their intersections, but we did not have time for asking what the resulting "grid" of intersections implies in terms of the judgments it encourages; I am pretty sure, though, that in the coming weeks, as we explore further some of the methodologies that Rose describes, as well as others, that more questions about the grid -- and what it encourages us to see or overlook, and how it positions us as reflexive viewers-critics, and about other possible configurations for considering visual objects -- will emerge.
You all noted how Rose's sites -- of production / image / audience -- parallel the 'traditional' triad of writing studies, of author / text / audience. We discussed why Rose would use "production" instead of "artist" or "composer," which would parallel the writing studies triad: this is a direct result, it would seem, with her concern that we consider the social conditions and effects of visual objects, such that we do not want to reduce production to an individual person purposefully and intentfully in control of a text. Rose's treatment does not come to production as Foucault's notion of the "author function" does, with the author/composer composed by readers out of and in response to a text (the closest to this would be her discussion of the what the "good eye" does in constructing ideas about great artists); instead, Rose's use of "production" seems aimed at keeping us imagining production as a coming together of a multiply scaled set of social / cultural / political /economic /technological processes.
But then why does she still hold to "audience," which keeps us imagining discrete people? Why does she not use "reception" as the parallel term? Alexa asked if this might be connected to a desire to make "audience" concrete as possible for us, to keep reminding us that this site is indeed real groups of real people responding, so that we do not think of passive reception. I have to admit, though, that "audience" carries precisely that connotation for me, of passivity. So why point us away (rightfully so, I think) from thinking of the producer as a single individual while keeping to the old term for the receivers?
We also asked whether "image" is inclusive enough for what she hopes to achieve, given that the word asks us to imagine static, 2D, realistically representative art works or photographs -- and such works are a tiny subset of the range of visual objects we compose for each other. The word also asks us to think of such work as statically contained, as objects that sit still before us; again, this goes against Rose's other attempts to encourage us toward more dynamic conceptions of processes. Here, for example, is where Christine pointed out the Eurocentricity of this -- and the other -- parts of this system: from her work with local tribal groups and photography, Christine noted that there is no word that captures, as "image" or "photograph" does for us, that sense of a stilled or caught object; she told us how the closest words always mean movement, someone doing something or on the way to somewhere. This, then, is a question we need to raise of the methodologies we consider this semester.
This also leads us into questioning after Rose's emphasis on reflexivity, her insistence that critical methodologies must consider the critic/analyst/teacher's "way of looking at images"; this is where Heather and Yang each asked about -- reminding us very appropriately -- of the place of the teacher in relation to the methodologies we teach. For each of the methodologies Rose presents in the book, she raises the objection that it is not or not sufficiently reflexive -- as we are noting that there is reflexivity about larger cultural positioning vis-à-vis historically/culturally developed systems of seeing and talking about seeing and the objects of sight. As our class talked, we realized that her complaints seem related to her grid of sites and modalities: within the grid, the alertness to social positioning that characterizes reflexivity is present for the sites of production and of reception -- but there is no overtly marked place in the grid for the reflexivity that Rose argues ought to accompany the work of the critic. In other words, Rose's grid does not, apparently, allow for there to be a methodological system in which reflexivity is necessarily called forth by the relation of the parts of the grid. If the grid is meant to encompass all the possible components of systems of looking and objects, then the critic -- and hence the critic's reflexivity -- is left out. The critic *could* be considered under audience, as some part of audience: how might the critic/analyst/teacher be woven into a visual methodology so that reflexivity would of necessity be part of the practice?
In addition, Steve wondered whether compositional methodologies are necessarily a part of any methodology that hopes to consider visual objects, since it is compositional methodologies that allow us to say anything about the structure of visual objects. Although Rose seems to dismiss such methodologies as the simplest and least reflexive of the methodologies, we noted that every other methodological approach -- when applied -- starts by describing in the object being analyzed its elements and the relations established between them. Rose's concerns about compositional methodologies ought to whisper behind us as we read for next week, for those readings -- the Donis and Arnheim (as with the Bang) -- are at the core of what many use for compositional analysis (as with Kress and van Leeuwen): are they as concerned with the "good eye" as Rose claims is the central point of compositional analysis?
Sunday, January 21, 2007
comic book school
Interesting how, in this article about a new school for people who want to be comic book artists, all the talk is of visual literacy and how we are living in an "increasingly visual culture."
for people in 5931
This thread in the Chronicle of Higher Education, on "How to teach a young adult what 'effort' is..." resonates with some of our class discussions.
laughing water
On Friday night we watched Deepa Mehta's Water. I cannot shake from my head the scene of Chuyia and Kalyani laughing together, playing pattycake (what else would you call it?) while it is raining outside. Chuyia's face and body are absorbed in the rhythms of joy: they are joy. She moves back and forth smiling and her eyes open and close and she laughs and giggles and is lost to it or, perhaps better, is it.
And so what happens later -- when Gulabi brings her back from across the river, her stilled and folded into herself down in the bottom of the little boat -- is more abhorrent, of course, than if there hadn't been that earlier scene.
Chuyia's ability to be joy in a physical game is the high moment of her being a child in the movie, there in the middle between the opening and closing where, in both, she is carried and what we see of her are her dangling feet.
Why is such release into the joy that comes of having a body that moves -- and moves well with others -- usually restricted to childish things? Or am I wrong?
The physicality allowed adults is so often constrained: trained athletics, social dance... Where is play?
Chuyia's joy comes out of the rhythms of pattycake, of being able to move quickly and in rhythm with someone else. The rhythms have to be learned, and the pleasure comes from being able to be just on the edge of rhythmic harmony with someone else, of moving quickly, of having a body that can do this, of being in that body. (That the rain -- the release of the monsoon -- is there all around them: that's a part of it, too, in the movie.)
I'm going skate skiing this afternoon.
And so what happens later -- when Gulabi brings her back from across the river, her stilled and folded into herself down in the bottom of the little boat -- is more abhorrent, of course, than if there hadn't been that earlier scene.
Chuyia's ability to be joy in a physical game is the high moment of her being a child in the movie, there in the middle between the opening and closing where, in both, she is carried and what we see of her are her dangling feet.
Why is such release into the joy that comes of having a body that moves -- and moves well with others -- usually restricted to childish things? Or am I wrong?
The physicality allowed adults is so often constrained: trained athletics, social dance... Where is play?
Chuyia's joy comes out of the rhythms of pattycake, of being able to move quickly and in rhythm with someone else. The rhythms have to be learned, and the pleasure comes from being able to be just on the edge of rhythmic harmony with someone else, of moving quickly, of having a body that can do this, of being in that body. (That the rain -- the release of the monsoon -- is there all around them: that's a part of it, too, in the movie.)
I'm going skate skiing this afternoon.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Frida Kahlo...
would probably have enjoyed robbing Mexican banks in the early twentieth century with Penelope Cruz in order to prevent the theft of farmers' property -- especially in satin corsets and with a scruffy dog named Stinky.
When I see Salma Hayek, her portrayal of Kahlo gets in the way of my seeing Hayek as Hayek. And so I watched the movie Bandidas (over two days, while exercising, honest) in some confusion: the movie seemed credible as an alternative bio, what might have happened if Kahlo had never been in the tram accident, had been involved with leftist politics in the desert countryside instead of in cities, and had taken up with Cruz instead of Rivera -- and if Sam Shepard had been around to help the two women clarify their shooting, knife-throwing, and body strength, and if she had decided to ride horses in breast-up-pushing lingerie. If Kahlo hadn't had that accident, if she had been able to live more easily in her body, wouldn't she have enjoyed all this? (Or at least the not-so-explicitly exploiting parts of it?)
Cruz and Hayek were clearly having fun. Frida would have had some laughs.
It's an attitude that might give me good perspective for thinking on Mark Hansen's Bodies in Code. I'm re-reading the book, for all its arguments on bodies, digitality, and recent art -- and is anyone else weaving Stiegler, Varela, Merleau-Ponty, Massumi, and Deleuze? I worked back through Hansen's introduction this morning. It is continuing the work of undoing philosophy -- and aesthetics -- that are based in the west's workings of sight in the last centuries, arguing for us to be operational rather than observational: for Hansen, it is possible with current digital arts (significantly, little that is visually 2D) to "facilitate the actualization of the organism's potential to extend its bodily boundaries and [so] to expand the scope of its bodily agency."
What underlies this, ethically, is a recognition that the ways of seeing into which we have grown up shape in too limited a fashion our sense of our bodies and so our sense of embodiment, where embodiment means to have a world. Hansen, given the theories on which he draws, is arguing that if we "expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity" we transform the "agency of collective existence.... from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation": this is to "think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with."
The question becomes, then, how to provoke that expansion -- and the book is Hansen's look at various digital art works that, he claims, do this. But is it enough simply to hang around such art or to interact with it, or must one form some sort of discursive relation with it? It would seem from the basis for all of this that simply being around the art should do what Hansen wants: to touch the prepersonal sensory, the interaction should be non-discursive, non-visual or non-primarily visual, and should have visceral force, yes?
This is art, then, that is to be built by someone who knows who we all are to be together but it is art built for someone who isn't supposed to ask or think about that. (Shades of Brenda Laurel's programmers making their religious-like immersive experiences back in Computers as Theater.) So I need to read for that, to see if that really is an outcome of what Hansen argues.
I also need to consider the ongoing notion of transduction, of that movement across gaps and of conversion -- because it sends me back to the scale/level questions that arose for me most recently in Powers's Echo Maker.
But I want to think also of the place of bodily pleasure in this, of the energetic, non-discursive, delight of two beautiful women riding their horses into the sunset in Mexico a pretend century ago, converted into my laughing on a snowy Tuesday evening which has now turned into early Wednesday morning. Good night.
When I see Salma Hayek, her portrayal of Kahlo gets in the way of my seeing Hayek as Hayek. And so I watched the movie Bandidas (over two days, while exercising, honest) in some confusion: the movie seemed credible as an alternative bio, what might have happened if Kahlo had never been in the tram accident, had been involved with leftist politics in the desert countryside instead of in cities, and had taken up with Cruz instead of Rivera -- and if Sam Shepard had been around to help the two women clarify their shooting, knife-throwing, and body strength, and if she had decided to ride horses in breast-up-pushing lingerie. If Kahlo hadn't had that accident, if she had been able to live more easily in her body, wouldn't she have enjoyed all this? (Or at least the not-so-explicitly exploiting parts of it?)
Cruz and Hayek were clearly having fun. Frida would have had some laughs.
It's an attitude that might give me good perspective for thinking on Mark Hansen's Bodies in Code. I'm re-reading the book, for all its arguments on bodies, digitality, and recent art -- and is anyone else weaving Stiegler, Varela, Merleau-Ponty, Massumi, and Deleuze? I worked back through Hansen's introduction this morning. It is continuing the work of undoing philosophy -- and aesthetics -- that are based in the west's workings of sight in the last centuries, arguing for us to be operational rather than observational: for Hansen, it is possible with current digital arts (significantly, little that is visually 2D) to "facilitate the actualization of the organism's potential to extend its bodily boundaries and [so] to expand the scope of its bodily agency."
What underlies this, ethically, is a recognition that the ways of seeing into which we have grown up shape in too limited a fashion our sense of our bodies and so our sense of embodiment, where embodiment means to have a world. Hansen, given the theories on which he draws, is arguing that if we "expand the scope of bodily (motor) activity" we transform the "agency of collective existence.... from a self-enclosed and primarily cognitive operation to an essentially open, only provisionally bounded, and fundamentally motor, participation": this is to "think of human existence as a prepersonal sensory being-with."
The question becomes, then, how to provoke that expansion -- and the book is Hansen's look at various digital art works that, he claims, do this. But is it enough simply to hang around such art or to interact with it, or must one form some sort of discursive relation with it? It would seem from the basis for all of this that simply being around the art should do what Hansen wants: to touch the prepersonal sensory, the interaction should be non-discursive, non-visual or non-primarily visual, and should have visceral force, yes?
This is art, then, that is to be built by someone who knows who we all are to be together but it is art built for someone who isn't supposed to ask or think about that. (Shades of Brenda Laurel's programmers making their religious-like immersive experiences back in Computers as Theater.) So I need to read for that, to see if that really is an outcome of what Hansen argues.
I also need to consider the ongoing notion of transduction, of that movement across gaps and of conversion -- because it sends me back to the scale/level questions that arose for me most recently in Powers's Echo Maker.
But I want to think also of the place of bodily pleasure in this, of the energetic, non-discursive, delight of two beautiful women riding their horses into the sunset in Mexico a pretend century ago, converted into my laughing on a snowy Tuesday evening which has now turned into early Wednesday morning. Good night.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Ten years ago....
who would have predicted that the Diss Group -- well, four-fifths of it, at least -- would have a reunion in the restaurant at the Baraga casino? Karla wasn't there, but Peggi was up from Texas, and Baraga is about mid-point between Houghton and Skanee, where Mary B. occasionally stays when she is in from the Sault. (And there are not exactly many places to eat in Baraga.) Peggi and Denise picked me up at school this afternoon, and we drove down and found Mary, who had gotten there a few moments before us and was wandering on the casino floor, dazed by the sounds of nickels dropping through for winners, but only the sounds of: there are no nickels anymore, but there is a recorded happy clanging to let you know you've won.
The casino is a small one, and it was surprisingly full for a mid-month Thursday night -- but we had the restaurant in the back pretty much to ourselves. If you had been wondering whether the restaurant is worth the drive, the answer is, um, well, no. The menu said that my whitefish came with a choice of potato or pasta. I asked what kind of pasta was available. The waitress said, "Um. I don't think he's made any, and you probably wouldn't want it anyway."
But we hadn't come for the food.
I wish Karla had been there. We filled each other in on stories between then and now and laughed and laughed. Denise can crack me up every time with her giggle and her stories about (for example) Yang's shoes. Mary shines as always, and since September is just at the other end of the UP, at Lake Superior State, where she is discovering what administrations try to pull off to keep unions at bay. And Peggi had a story that had us weeping, about a young woman in a class, on a cellphone, telling a girlfriend all about her disappointing sexual adventures from the night before and not realizing that everyone else could hear -- and that the class had, in fact, stopped to listen. Peggi followed up with a discussion of the sense of space developing around new communication technologies.
Why do such friends move to other towns?
The casino is a small one, and it was surprisingly full for a mid-month Thursday night -- but we had the restaurant in the back pretty much to ourselves. If you had been wondering whether the restaurant is worth the drive, the answer is, um, well, no. The menu said that my whitefish came with a choice of potato or pasta. I asked what kind of pasta was available. The waitress said, "Um. I don't think he's made any, and you probably wouldn't want it anyway."
But we hadn't come for the food.
I wish Karla had been there. We filled each other in on stories between then and now and laughed and laughed. Denise can crack me up every time with her giggle and her stories about (for example) Yang's shoes. Mary shines as always, and since September is just at the other end of the UP, at Lake Superior State, where she is discovering what administrations try to pull off to keep unions at bay. And Peggi had a story that had us weeping, about a young woman in a class, on a cellphone, telling a girlfriend all about her disappointing sexual adventures from the night before and not realizing that everyone else could hear -- and that the class had, in fact, stopped to listen. Peggi followed up with a discussion of the sense of space developing around new communication technologies.
Why do such friends move to other towns?
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
The Godfather is on in the background,
and the horse's head is under the sheets. A mixed response I have to the scene: someone was clever enough to think up the head as a very personal and fitting response within the lives of the movie -- and how seriously frightening and disgusting it would be to wake up within those bloody sheets.
Does that distinction parallel the distinction Richard Shusterman makes in Performing Live between "somatic practices of representation" and "the somatics of experience"?
Per Shusterman, "representational somaesthetics emphasizes the body's external appearance while experiential disciplines focus not on how the body looks from the outside but on the aesthetic quality of its experience." The first chapter of the book is Shusterman's argument that the notion of aesthetic experience has lost "power and interest" since Dewey: with Dewey, Shusterman claims, aesthetic experience was a valued experience of vivid sensuous/emotional/cognitive integration; Shusterman argues that, as analytic philosophers of art have written about aesthetic experience since then, however, Dewey's "transformational notion of aesthetic experience has been gradually replaced by a purely descriptive, semantic one whose chief purpose is to explain and thus support the established demarcation of art from other domains." Shusterman wants to be back, to some extent, with Dewey, to have complex bodily experiences merged through aesthetic experience: "By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience [instead of in terms of art works in museums], Dewey hoped we could radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real world, which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living."
For there to be that reinvigoration of such experiences, however, there has to be a reinvigoration of (the study of and within) bodies. The notion of the aesthetic has to be moved from assuming a primarily visual basis and from assuming a primarily consumptive function: these underlie the representational kind of aesthetics that Shusterman places against the experiential kind. Shusterman doesn't discuss the current emphasis on visuality and consumptive practices much, but it's implied in what he writes about experiential somaesthetics. Experiential somaesthetics is about remembering bodies as media, in the sense that they -- like other media -- are inseparably wound into our constructions of what counts as real; bodies are therefore worthy of care and cultivation, so that their experiences are available for clarification, exploration, understanding.
I need to consider all this against Hansen's work in Bodies in Code, which begins with a focused argument (bringing Steigler together with some Deleuze) that we need practices that help us shift from understanding -- and using -- bodies as observational to bodies as operational. Hansen argues for digital artworks that address bodies on more sensuous levels than the visual. I also need to consider this all against the old arguments that start at least with McLuhan (and wind their way through Jay et al) about the poverty of the visual (at least as it has been deployed in the West).
But that is all for pleasure later. For now, Shusterman's distinction between representation and experiential aesthetics is useful for me (as are the further distinctions among performative and practical somaesthetics). My response to the horse's head ties in with what Shusterman acknowledges, that the representational and experiential feed back and forth into each other: what I see on screen results in feelings, certainly, but what Shusterman wants to encourage is more alertness to those feelings and to their causes and effects. Within this, though, how does one discuss the distinction between the more cognitive response I have to the formal/narrative aspects of the movie and the visceral response to the gore? This is a distinction whose separations and overlaps are so little addressed (to my knowledge) in the two camps that often address aesthetic issues now, that of cultural studies (which speaks of the content of representations) and that of visual literacy and visual composition studies (which speak of visceral responses to formal arrangements). I need to consider more where Burke comes down between these, and I need to return to someone like Williamson's semiotic take on advertising.
But now we are sleeping with the fishes, so it is perhaps time to let this little mess of thoughts rest and bubble.
Does that distinction parallel the distinction Richard Shusterman makes in Performing Live between "somatic practices of representation" and "the somatics of experience"?
Per Shusterman, "representational somaesthetics emphasizes the body's external appearance while experiential disciplines focus not on how the body looks from the outside but on the aesthetic quality of its experience." The first chapter of the book is Shusterman's argument that the notion of aesthetic experience has lost "power and interest" since Dewey: with Dewey, Shusterman claims, aesthetic experience was a valued experience of vivid sensuous/emotional/cognitive integration; Shusterman argues that, as analytic philosophers of art have written about aesthetic experience since then, however, Dewey's "transformational notion of aesthetic experience has been gradually replaced by a purely descriptive, semantic one whose chief purpose is to explain and thus support the established demarcation of art from other domains." Shusterman wants to be back, to some extent, with Dewey, to have complex bodily experiences merged through aesthetic experience: "By rethinking art in terms of aesthetic experience [instead of in terms of art works in museums], Dewey hoped we could radically enlarge and democratize the domain of art, integrating it more fully into the real world, which would be greatly improved by the pursuit of such manifold arts of living."
For there to be that reinvigoration of such experiences, however, there has to be a reinvigoration of (the study of and within) bodies. The notion of the aesthetic has to be moved from assuming a primarily visual basis and from assuming a primarily consumptive function: these underlie the representational kind of aesthetics that Shusterman places against the experiential kind. Shusterman doesn't discuss the current emphasis on visuality and consumptive practices much, but it's implied in what he writes about experiential somaesthetics. Experiential somaesthetics is about remembering bodies as media, in the sense that they -- like other media -- are inseparably wound into our constructions of what counts as real; bodies are therefore worthy of care and cultivation, so that their experiences are available for clarification, exploration, understanding.
I need to consider all this against Hansen's work in Bodies in Code, which begins with a focused argument (bringing Steigler together with some Deleuze) that we need practices that help us shift from understanding -- and using -- bodies as observational to bodies as operational. Hansen argues for digital artworks that address bodies on more sensuous levels than the visual. I also need to consider this all against the old arguments that start at least with McLuhan (and wind their way through Jay et al) about the poverty of the visual (at least as it has been deployed in the West).
But that is all for pleasure later. For now, Shusterman's distinction between representation and experiential aesthetics is useful for me (as are the further distinctions among performative and practical somaesthetics). My response to the horse's head ties in with what Shusterman acknowledges, that the representational and experiential feed back and forth into each other: what I see on screen results in feelings, certainly, but what Shusterman wants to encourage is more alertness to those feelings and to their causes and effects. Within this, though, how does one discuss the distinction between the more cognitive response I have to the formal/narrative aspects of the movie and the visceral response to the gore? This is a distinction whose separations and overlaps are so little addressed (to my knowledge) in the two camps that often address aesthetic issues now, that of cultural studies (which speaks of the content of representations) and that of visual literacy and visual composition studies (which speak of visceral responses to formal arrangements). I need to consider more where Burke comes down between these, and I need to return to someone like Williamson's semiotic take on advertising.
But now we are sleeping with the fishes, so it is perhaps time to let this little mess of thoughts rest and bubble.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Houghton, snow and brains
When we look out the house windows tonight, the lights across the Portage are faded, soft, and diffuse, one indication of snow; another is the pickup truck sliding backwards down our street's little hill (the truck and driver are okay; we made sure). When we first moved here, a night like tonight would have had us excited and happy: nothing like this ever happens in Los Angeles. After some years, though, our comments tonight are along the lines of "It's about time!" There is, finally, snow, and so the world moves as it ought and we can fit more easily back into the expected time zone and place.
And because I now can live here again without being distracted by my body clock, I spent the part of the day when I wasn't in meetings thinking about brains: last night I finished Powers's The Echo Maker. I have read almost all of Oliver Sacks's books, and knew about Capgras Syndrome from my reading about visual processing, where some explain the syndrome by speaking of how visual neural processing passes through the amygdalae on its way to the more visually focused parts of the brain; if the amygdalae are damaged, then the emotional connotations of all sightings can be damaged. The emotional tenor of involved in seeing one's parents (for example) will be missing, and so those people will look like the familiar parents but seem like impostors -- until one speaks to them on the phone, when emotion and sensation are once again linked. If one sees them again, however, they are no longer emotionally shaded people, but rather just people with whom no one feels any connection.
But the Powers's book -- like Sack's writing on neurology -- raises another linking (or dislinking) for me. When I read The Man Who Mistook... upon its first appearance (I remember speaking to Art Quinn about it, so this is back in the early 80s, sigh), I remember sensing a tension for Sacks: the people about whom he writes are lively and present, with quirks and unpredictabilities and intriguing characters; his writing is about how character is neurology. Sacks does not write about how his research suggests such a reduction; reading him is instead for me like reading through two different eyeglass prescriptions at once, one view of neurons linking to others, another of people linking to each other. And just as I have trouble with quick changes between prescriptions...
So: thinking out loud:
I have no problem conceiving of the overlapping -- and experientially incommensurate -- worlds of (for example) microbes and me: I have seen enough science visualization films to be able to imagine how a tabletop (for example) would simply not be a surface to a microbe but rather a permeability. I can start to imagine -- and understand some of the limitations of the imaginings -- moving through the world with an other-than-human sense apparatus, such as has a fox or tree, because their sensing/responsive structures are identifiable in their processes and recognitions; the fox or tree or slime mold, however, inhabits a different world than I do precisely because its sensing/responsive structures are not the same as mine. It is, however, when I try to do the both-at-once -- I am neurons and other cell types and mitochondria! I am a funky messy human not purposefully stepping on ants! -- that I have some translation anxiety. When I consider the neurons, whose actions make perfect sense and are a pleasure to contemplate, I am fine; when I consider the human scale, I am fine. But how can I be both at once? To whom am I both at once? Is there a scale at which I can be both at once?
This is, perhaps, the tension that implodes the Sacks character at the end of Powers's book, when the character tries to live both at once. This is more than "Two, two, two mints in one," more than Faye Dunaway's head snapping back and forth -- sister, mother, sister, mother -- in Chinatown or River Phoenix's rotting trailer flat stare -- brother, father? -- in his own Idaho. This is not the duplicity of Heraclitus or Hegel, where the other -- the opposite -- defines me because I can tick off what I am by negating each item of what the other is, where I can delineate my spatial location and shape because I am the space unfilled by the other. But the both-at-once definition instead rests on two beings not being present to each other in shared space and time, because their spaces, times, scales, and senses are not the same: they are not in the same world; their worlds are exclusive.
This is perhaps a little like the Eames's Powers of 10, I guess, the moving out and in from the couple in the park in Chicago to the edges of the then known universe and then out and in to the atomic level: everything contains everything else and the story could be a circle instead of a pendulum. What you see just depends on where you stop. But this implies a gradation from one perspective to the next -- and is that what differentiates the slime mold from me or a seedling from a city?
I should get on to the letters of recommendation I have to write tonight. Thanks for the fun.
And because I now can live here again without being distracted by my body clock, I spent the part of the day when I wasn't in meetings thinking about brains: last night I finished Powers's The Echo Maker. I have read almost all of Oliver Sacks's books, and knew about Capgras Syndrome from my reading about visual processing, where some explain the syndrome by speaking of how visual neural processing passes through the amygdalae on its way to the more visually focused parts of the brain; if the amygdalae are damaged, then the emotional connotations of all sightings can be damaged. The emotional tenor of involved in seeing one's parents (for example) will be missing, and so those people will look like the familiar parents but seem like impostors -- until one speaks to them on the phone, when emotion and sensation are once again linked. If one sees them again, however, they are no longer emotionally shaded people, but rather just people with whom no one feels any connection.
But the Powers's book -- like Sack's writing on neurology -- raises another linking (or dislinking) for me. When I read The Man Who Mistook... upon its first appearance (I remember speaking to Art Quinn about it, so this is back in the early 80s, sigh), I remember sensing a tension for Sacks: the people about whom he writes are lively and present, with quirks and unpredictabilities and intriguing characters; his writing is about how character is neurology. Sacks does not write about how his research suggests such a reduction; reading him is instead for me like reading through two different eyeglass prescriptions at once, one view of neurons linking to others, another of people linking to each other. And just as I have trouble with quick changes between prescriptions...
So: thinking out loud:
I have no problem conceiving of the overlapping -- and experientially incommensurate -- worlds of (for example) microbes and me: I have seen enough science visualization films to be able to imagine how a tabletop (for example) would simply not be a surface to a microbe but rather a permeability. I can start to imagine -- and understand some of the limitations of the imaginings -- moving through the world with an other-than-human sense apparatus, such as has a fox or tree, because their sensing/responsive structures are identifiable in their processes and recognitions; the fox or tree or slime mold, however, inhabits a different world than I do precisely because its sensing/responsive structures are not the same as mine. It is, however, when I try to do the both-at-once -- I am neurons and other cell types and mitochondria! I am a funky messy human not purposefully stepping on ants! -- that I have some translation anxiety. When I consider the neurons, whose actions make perfect sense and are a pleasure to contemplate, I am fine; when I consider the human scale, I am fine. But how can I be both at once? To whom am I both at once? Is there a scale at which I can be both at once?
This is, perhaps, the tension that implodes the Sacks character at the end of Powers's book, when the character tries to live both at once. This is more than "Two, two, two mints in one," more than Faye Dunaway's head snapping back and forth -- sister, mother, sister, mother -- in Chinatown or River Phoenix's rotting trailer flat stare -- brother, father? -- in his own Idaho. This is not the duplicity of Heraclitus or Hegel, where the other -- the opposite -- defines me because I can tick off what I am by negating each item of what the other is, where I can delineate my spatial location and shape because I am the space unfilled by the other. But the both-at-once definition instead rests on two beings not being present to each other in shared space and time, because their spaces, times, scales, and senses are not the same: they are not in the same world; their worlds are exclusive.
This is perhaps a little like the Eames's Powers of 10, I guess, the moving out and in from the couple in the park in Chicago to the edges of the then known universe and then out and in to the atomic level: everything contains everything else and the story could be a circle instead of a pendulum. What you see just depends on where you stop. But this implies a gradation from one perspective to the next -- and is that what differentiates the slime mold from me or a seedling from a city?
I should get on to the letters of recommendation I have to write tonight. Thanks for the fun.
Monday, January 8, 2007
returning to Houghton, day 3
The weather gods were gentle, providing sun most of the way home today for the last, not quite 3 hour, stretch of the trip. The blue of the sky was intensified by the snow on the ground and the occasional grey cloud. The roads were icy in parts, and there was some drifting, but we are home now, remembering our bodies back into this particular configuration of daylight hours. The cat has returned to our bed from her while-we-are-away hiding place, and has also quieted from her first hours of complaint.
This afternoon I read job applications as my warm up for the New Year; there are some lovely smart people out there. And now, Shusterman's Performing Live, finishing from the plane.
This afternoon I read job applications as my warm up for the New Year; there are some lovely smart people out there. And now, Shusterman's Performing Live, finishing from the plane.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
returning to Houghton, day 2
When there are only 5 people in a plane that seats 30, the pilots, "for reasons of weight during takeoff and landing," have you all move to the back of the plane. The move should inspire some of that "jeez, we live in small towns" camaraderie, but because the back of the plane is where riders feel more of the movements of the plane through cloudy and windy nights, especially when the plane is light, it tends instead to inspire quiet moments of hoping that the flight is smooth. Which it was -- all 26 minutes of it from Eau Claire, WI, to Rhinelander, WI. The flight attendant pulled off a beverage service, too.
We are, now, in the Comfort Inn of Rhinelander, looking out into an inch or two of snow covering the parking lot of the Home Depot, across which front -- in this cloudy night -- there is a huge shadow of a small American flag waving in a big light and small flurries. The ingredient on Iron Chef America is lentils, and I have Richard Powers's The Echo Maker to finish, having left it in the car at the airport because it was too big to carry in my backpack.
One more time zone to go.
We are, now, in the Comfort Inn of Rhinelander, looking out into an inch or two of snow covering the parking lot of the Home Depot, across which front -- in this cloudy night -- there is a huge shadow of a small American flag waving in a big light and small flurries. The ingredient on Iron Chef America is lentils, and I have Richard Powers's The Echo Maker to finish, having left it in the car at the airport because it was too big to carry in my backpack.
One more time zone to go.
Saturday, January 6, 2007
returning to Houghton, day 1
Ferry leaves Shaw at 10:30am and arrives at noon at Anacortes: many cormorants and big ocean gulls, some grebes, some wide rolling swells in the Strait.
Bus to airport arrives, 1pm. (We waited with two people who had grown up together on San Juan Island, one now headed back to finish his first year of college, the other back to her job in Bellingham. Before we started talking with them, they were trading memories from kindergarten; Dennis said it was like watching Dawson's Creek.)
Bus drops us at airport, 4pm.
Shuttle gets us to hotel, 4:45pm.
Indian food delivered to the room, and here we are, Uma going after Lucy in the snow, with swords.
You would think we are traveling from someplace far away to someplace far away. If all goes well, we'll be home on Monday.
Bus to airport arrives, 1pm. (We waited with two people who had grown up together on San Juan Island, one now headed back to finish his first year of college, the other back to her job in Bellingham. Before we started talking with them, they were trading memories from kindergarten; Dennis said it was like watching Dawson's Creek.)
Bus drops us at airport, 4pm.
Shuttle gets us to hotel, 4:45pm.
Indian food delivered to the room, and here we are, Uma going after Lucy in the snow, with swords.
You would think we are traveling from someplace far away to someplace far away. If all goes well, we'll be home on Monday.
Friday, January 5, 2007
why, it's raining!
And so we talk about what to make for dinner and when to wake each other up from our naps. (Dennis, Brian, and Sam did chainsaw up a tree that had blocked a neighbor's road, while I read another Australian novel, this one about being dope addled in the seventies. The required efforts seem pretty equal -- and I would have helped with the tree, had there not already been too many hands and backs. Really. I like chainsaws and the smell of cut wood, especially in the rain. Especially when it's being described in someone else's writing.)
Meanwhile, we have learned that the ferry people do not talk to the shuttle-to-the-airport people, so, while the ferry arrives at the mainland at 3 pm tomorrow, the shuttle leaves at 2:55. The next shuttle is at 6. I hope there is another novel, one I can borrow, with long thick descriptions of what it's like to sift slowly through long hot Melbourne afternoons.
Meanwhile, we have learned that the ferry people do not talk to the shuttle-to-the-airport people, so, while the ferry arrives at the mainland at 3 pm tomorrow, the shuttle leaves at 2:55. The next shuttle is at 6. I hope there is another novel, one I can borrow, with long thick descriptions of what it's like to sift slowly through long hot Melbourne afternoons.
Thursday, January 4, 2007
oz in the pacific northwest
Because B&B lived in Australia for eight years, they would send us things we wouldn't probably otherwise know about, like Tim Winton novels and TimTams.
On their island bookshelf, now that they are back, I have been looking through the mix of here and there books, and on Monday afternoon came to Tom Kenneally's Bettany's Book. It is six-hundred pages thick, and threads together the lives of several related people a century and a half apart, first several Europeans new to Australia -- both born and transported there -- and then two sisters several generations later. Along with paralleling these generations of people writing about their lives and becoming who they are, it also involves what happened in the Sudan during the nineties, for one of the sisters goes there. It is a book of echoes, and of deepening, and I happily slurped into it and just now am washed up afterwards, and B is calling me to a new episode of CSI, the original, and I am not sure I can handle the shift.
Nor am I ready to prepare to leave here, to make -- tomorrow -- the shuttle reservations for Saturday. I would be a dreamer and a drifter, always, someone not tied to where I live, for altogether too many reasons.
On their island bookshelf, now that they are back, I have been looking through the mix of here and there books, and on Monday afternoon came to Tom Kenneally's Bettany's Book. It is six-hundred pages thick, and threads together the lives of several related people a century and a half apart, first several Europeans new to Australia -- both born and transported there -- and then two sisters several generations later. Along with paralleling these generations of people writing about their lives and becoming who they are, it also involves what happened in the Sudan during the nineties, for one of the sisters goes there. It is a book of echoes, and of deepening, and I happily slurped into it and just now am washed up afterwards, and B is calling me to a new episode of CSI, the original, and I am not sure I can handle the shift.
Nor am I ready to prepare to leave here, to make -- tomorrow -- the shuttle reservations for Saturday. I would be a dreamer and a drifter, always, someone not tied to where I live, for altogether too many reasons.
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
I like being on the edges
Where we are now is tucked about as far into the northwest of the U.S. as you can be and still be on the map, and where we usually live is enough on the edges that it doesn't even show up on some maps. I have always lived close to water with a non-visible other side.
I am a listener from the corners at parties, unless there is champagne. But I am also pretty good at asking questions.
I was the first daughter after three sons.
Just recording some observations, after a long walk in the rain, figuring out where I want to stand in this new year, what party dress I want to wear through the season.
I am a listener from the corners at parties, unless there is champagne. But I am also pretty good at asking questions.
I was the first daughter after three sons.
Just recording some observations, after a long walk in the rain, figuring out where I want to stand in this new year, what party dress I want to wear through the season.
Monday, January 1, 2007
The New Year...
is raining and cool, good for a long walk under the drooping cedars. Bindi -- Brian and Buni's round terrier -- walked with us but did not want to stay on one side of the road or the other, and we did not know her particular words for making her stay on one side or the other -- which gave us the pleasure of meeting Barney and Joyce, who live down the hill on the little isthmus out to Broken Point. Until we turned off the road to come home, Barney and Joyce drove their old pickup behind Bindi at Bindi's pace, which is also a good pace for a little conversation with people walking alongside. Barney had said, with a cheering smile, "I do not think it's a good idea to start the New Year by running over a dog."
The air is moist and full of cedar and pine smells, and we have progressed from not knowing what time of day it is to not knowing what day of the week it is. Brian has made bread and pizza (for last night's warm conversation and celebration at Gwen and Eric's glowing house right on the sound, with the red ravens), Dennis is now stuffing a chicken, I made a huge pot of soup from the Christmas turkey, and we have all been reading. And napping.
How good it is to be far away, on this island.
The air is moist and full of cedar and pine smells, and we have progressed from not knowing what time of day it is to not knowing what day of the week it is. Brian has made bread and pizza (for last night's warm conversation and celebration at Gwen and Eric's glowing house right on the sound, with the red ravens), Dennis is now stuffing a chicken, I made a huge pot of soup from the Christmas turkey, and we have all been reading. And napping.
How good it is to be far away, on this island.
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