The Green Man!

Got this from Jimmy Feeney this a.m.  Oh, how wonderful!  I wish I could do this.  I wish I could dye my hair green, too.

Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp

I love this piece, especially the Casals portion.  The room is darkening, it's quiet and peaceful.  Perfect for listening to music.

Visualizing Bach: Alexander Chen’s Impossible Harp

New Writer

"New" for me, that is.  His name is Edward P. Jones, and he is, according to a recent article in the WP Magazine by Neely Tucker, "the greatest fiction writer the nation's capital has ever produced." He has published three books, two collections of short stories and one novel, The Known World.

Tucker's article says

He makes his home near Washington National Cathedral....There is no bed..., no bookshelves, no couch, nor much to sit on other than a kitchen chair. He does not have a car, a driver's license or any mechanized means of transport, not even a bicycle. He has no cellphone, no DVD player, and his Internet connection is sporadic. Though he loves movies and trash daytime television--in particular, those judge shows--he has only a 10-year-old, 13-inch TV and has never had cable.

He created his first book, the novel The Known World, in his head for a period of about 10 years, then wrote it all down in 2001 when he was laid off from his job for three months.   It won the Pulitzer Prize.

Ordinarily, I'm a very fast reader--consuming a book a day is not unusual.  All books don't allow this, though--this book especially. I have spent the past three days reading The Known World, and I'm on page 72 out of 388, and I'm worrying that I'm going too fast lest I miss something. I don't have any words to describe his writing other than to say it's unlike anything else I've ever read.  Well, a few of my favorite writers come to mind:  Tolstory, Faulkner, Robertson Davies--but even they write on the surface at times. Jones is an architect, and he uses words to build his stories. He's also a painter and a poet and a sculptor with words. 

Jones, for all his shyness and unassuming ways and modest output, has won in addition to the Pulitzer Prize,

the National Book Critic's Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur "genius grant," the Lannan Literary Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a bunch of (by comparison) trifling stuff. He's won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone, never mind earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

Well, it's time for me to be moving again, and that means more downsizing. Edward P. Jones has set a shining example for getting along without a whole bunch of stuff. I really don't need a short ton of books, let alone seven bookcases to hold them. True, he's had a very different life, but he's been firmly in charge of it.

I went to grad school at the age of 60 and graduated 18 months later on what would have been my mother's 101st birthday. I still remember from those days what a thrill it was to have read Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg for the first time, knowing they'd been around and famous for their writing for a long time despite my ignorance.

This is one of the very best things about being my age. There are still riches unmined in the library.

Glad Midsommar!!!

Midsummer Eve has long been my favorite day of the whole year. It's the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, but most people know it simply as the first day of summer. This day enjoys the most sunlight (not necessarily sunshine...it's cloudy and overcast here in DC); the sun will not set until after 8:30 tonight. Actually, here in DC, today and the next two days--June 20-22--will be exactly the same length: sunrise at 5:43am and sunset at 8:37pm. On June 23, DC will lose a minute of precious sunlight in the morning: sunrise at 5:44am...and thus darkness will increase bit by bit until after December 21, when the hours of daylight again begin stretching a minute or two at a time each day.

When we visited Door County in the summer years ago, we learned about the Swedish Midsummer Festival and Door County's famous fish boil and cherry pie. If I can find some whitefish in these parts, I intend to make this. The stove top recipe is basically 8 quarts of water boiling in a big pot, 2 CUPS of salt (one cup goes in first when the water boils and you put in the potatoes, and the other cup goes in about 25 mins later when you add the fish), 12 pieces of whitefish fillet, and 12 potatoes. Not fancy. Note: most Door County recipes caution you not to do the OUTDOOR fish-in-a-big-pot-over-the-bonfire trick of burning off the fish oil with kerosene!! You just skim it off with a big spoon as needed. You serve the fish and potatoes with melted butter for dipping and, if you wish, slices of lemon for people to squeeze on the fish. Proper Door County cherry pie requires cherries from Door County, but we make do....

ANYWAY...

On this day of greatest light, Xtreme English has included a link to Esther Garvi aka Ishtar News. Esther Garvi is a young woman born in Sweden who has lived in Niger for more than 20 years as an unpaid volunteer for the Eden Foundation.

The Eden Foundation in Niger, West Africa, was established in 1985 by Garvi's parents, Arne and Bettan Garvi. The Eden Foundation's philosophy is explained in this foundation newsletter published in 2008:

There are 250,000 known plant species in the world, but only 20 of them provide 90% of our food. Eden believes that the key to prosperity for the poor lie in underexploited, edible trees and bushes - the lost treasures of Eden.

The young couple and their three children moved to Niger and started to work. I encourage you to read this blog and enjoy their story.

Esther Garvi's work, joy in life, and writing skill make her a worthy role model, and her blog is a real find. So...while we celebrate the glorious sunlight and admire the beauty of Sweden, whose residents cherish the sunlight and throw a festival to welcome summer, XE would like to mark the occasion by including a link to Ms. Garvi's blog.

Ravello

After landing in Naples, I got in line for customs, where I was entertained by an enterprising 3-year-old who insisted on touching everything in sight while his mother patiently called him to come back and stand by her. He was so distracting that I was almost at the customs window before I realized I was in the wrong line--the one for EU citizens only. I looked over at the other line and saw there were lots more non-EU citizens than local folks arriving in Naples.

I was the last person through customs and into the waiting room down the hall. Cathy and Ranieri (son of the hotel owner and designated driver for airport pickups) were overjoyed to see me. It's hard on the nerves to wait for a superannuated friend while she travels mostly out of network for, at that point, 24 hours. "You have to trust" I said, amid all the sighs of relief, and we took off for the hour and a half drive to Ravello.

It was fully dark by the time we got to the hotel, and I pretty much fell into bed. I took this photo the following evening through the balcony glass in the restaurant next door. There are reflections of the room mixed in with the town lights of Minori down on the coast, but this basically is what I saw when I stepped out onto the balcony upon arrival.

On the way to Naples.....part 1

This jewel of the advertiser's art was the first thing to greet me when I walked in the door of London Stansted airport after a comfortable, restful bus ride from Heathrow. Stansted is home to one of the UK's and Ireland's great small airlines, EasyJet, that was to take me to Naples. This billboard absolutely put to rest all my fears about Naples that had been fueled by stories in recent editions of BBC.com: the garbage collection crisis (ongoing since this past Christmas), the thieves on the streets and buses, the sinister presence of the Camorra.

In fact, I could feel my U.S.-bred paranoia slipping away the longer I was exposed to the Londoners with their cheerful outlook despite having to pay about ten bucks a gallon for gas. The British humor has always cracked me up. Need a drink of soda? How about a can of Pret's "Yoga Bunny Detox, Balanced with Ginseng & Echinacea, Liquid Psychiatry, No Nasties?"



Need a cheap fare? How about one of these?



And see all those folks in the yellow vests? The British employ a small army of helpers in their airports, and they were so friendly and sweet, I wanted to bring some home with me.

"You want the Central Bus Station? Just keep on going this way, and you'll be right there. Can't miss it. What time do you have to be there? Half an hour? You've plenty of time. Have a wonderful holiday."

I get choked up just thinking about them. (Have I been in D.C. too long?)

But what's better than all that? Peggy flew all the way down from Glasgow to hang out in the airport with me until late afternoon, when my flight left for Naples. (I asked her to pose like this because it's one of her very favorites.)



She has the helpful Brit spirit, too. She asked the security people if I could take a can of Yoga Bunny Detox on the plane to give to Cathy.



Alas, this is where the soda and I parted.



More to come....next stop: Ravello!!

I share your resentments!

The first line of Andrew Solomon's 1995 NY Times interview of Gore Vidal in his villa at Ravello, Gore Vidal Receives a Visitor, goes like this:

Gore Vidal's villa in Ravello, though not particularly big or grand, is as enchanting as he makes it sound: white stucco anchored miraculously into the sheer face of the cliff, 12 acres of vertical stone and terraced gardens, a pool that commands the same panorama as the house, an extra balcony for cocktails just along the rock face.

The villa in its setting does sound impressive, and I'm going to see it, at least from afar, this week.

Vidal lets fly with his rapier wit in the interview as he comments on writers and writing, politicians and politics. It's very funny, but one part especially caught my attention. Asked to comment on the modern gay movement, Vidal said:

"The resentments! 'I share your resentments' should be a greeting. As you enter a queer bar: 'I share your resentments, good evening, I share them. May all your resentments be mine.' My God! 'We had a wonderful day at the beach resenting consenting adults of the other sex.' "

"I share your resentments." What a perfect entree to any conversation about any movement, not just gay pride. Deaf pride? "I share your resentments toward any deaf person who a) can read, write, and speak well and b) does all three."

Congratulations, Ronniecat!!!

Ronniecat has a swell new job! She'll be doing what she's doing now in the private sector (working with multicultural and community associations) for the Canadian gummint. Her new gig involves lots more money, better benefits--and doing it all in FRENCH! Is this a brave young woman, or what?

The downside will be either a 4-hour commute each day or, alternatively, spending part of each week AWAY from her dear Husband and Cats!! I WAS hoping that on days she picks the commute, she could do so via the fabulous Canadian rail. Four hours of naps, breakfast or dinner (or both) in the cafe car, reading, listening to tunes, and at night sleeping in her own bed.... but ha...Canadian Rail, alas, is no more fabulous in the wilds of New Brunswick than Amtrack is in, say, North Dakota or Iowa. There seems to be but one train per weekday that runs between the town where Ronniecat will start her new job and a station that is relatively close to where she lives now (but not RIGHT IN TOWN).

We've learned to look up to Canada as superior and more civilized than our beloved US of A. But golly whiz...it's THEIR polar bears who are being forced to swim where once they could sit on the ice and have a civilized Canadian dinner of baby seals. You'd think the Canadians'd, um, do something about beefing up their trains instead of bragging about all their new highways.

Oh, they are superior. I'm not being snide. As a Yankee, I've come to expect greater clarity of thought from the rest of the world on the whole issue of global warming. But get this, the Loonie is now worth more than the US peso-formerly-known-as-dollar! Methinks the end is nigh....

Welcome to Red Nose!

Xtreme English has a new blog fave, Red Nose, which originates in the DC metropolitan area. The following is ad copy:

For the best in fun commentary, come to the City of Satan (as I-kissed-George-W-Bush John McCain calls it)!!

The blogger, Bozoette, has been a real clown--a graduate of Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Clown College--and she loves and writes about the innermost secret of clown humor: everyday life (plus the wins and losses of our semi-beloved bumblers, the Redskins).

Her current post includes a Love List that includes, but is not limited to, the following entries:

•Macaroni and cheese - homemade, out of a box, from the cafeteria; I don't care. I love it.
•Hot chocolate with whipped cream.
•Coffee with whipped cream.
•Oh heck, whipped cream.
•Mojitos that do not taste like Scope.
•Tres Leches cake.

Is this our kinda person or wot??? She joins Xtreme English's list of authentic original blog peeps. Speaking of whom, Mad Cabby is out of the hospital (if you can believe Pastor Joe) and mending (ditto), and Peggy has quit throwing out imperfectly good chocolate chip cookies to the chickens over there in Scotland.

Red Nose was kind enough to review Xtreme English in As Time Goes By's recent post, Getting to Know the Elderblogger's List. Just scroll waaay down.

"Falling for Grace"

Tribeca Film Festival this year showed "Falling for Grace," a remarkably enjoyable romantic comedy produced, written, and directed by--and starring!--Fay Ann Lee. Besides Lee, who plays Grace, the cast also includes Margaret Cho, Gale Harold, and Christine Baranski. The movie played in DC this past Saturday at the AMC Loews Dupont 5 theater just off Dupont Circle.

After the movie finished, Lee herself stood up before the audience for a surprise Q and A session about the movie, her life, Chinatown, the importance of family. She's as beautiful and articulate in real life as she is in the movie.

The movie has shown in only two places so far--San Francisco and Washington DC--but it's gotten good reviews since airing at Tribeca (see "Press" section in the official website).

Somebody in the reviews said Lee may be the Asian Julia Roberts. I dunno....did Julia Roberts write, produce, direct, and star in her first movie? Lee's a phenomenon. The movie's still here, and if anyone from DC reads this post, do yourself a favor and go see it. You can bring the kids...the movie has a PG-13 rating.

Knitting as TM?

A Little Red Hen knitted (knit? knat?) this fetching baby hat in TWO DAYS!! What's more, this blindingly speedy knitting feat was only ONE of the things LRH accomplished in those two days (not to mention blogging about it!!). Ufda! LRH seems to be a force of nature.

In any case, she is definitely individuated in the Jungian sense--not much group-think there. She said she also was pondering a remark I made in a recent post here about...oh, what? older folks vis-a-vis media attention? something like that. I probably stepped on a bunch of toes when I opined that nobody seems to cares about old people as a group, any more than they care about any other folks as a group. Maybe it's because I've been excluded from full participation in the media for so long, thanks to being deaf, that everything really wonderful has come to me from individual people--and mostly one at a time, too--and so I think everyone experiences life like that.

I don't know what the media are up to these days, but it doesn't seem good. I miss Bill Moyers every week on PBS. There's little I want to watch or read. And I'm not alone....Jamie Lee Curtis had a great essay in today's Huffington Post on not watching television.

Anyway, I'm too slow to take in more than one thing at a time. I could no more knit a hat for a small head in two days than I could fly. In fact, if I were a betting person, I'd put my dough on flying. Well, I know people can levitate. I spent an afternoon trying to take a nap in a basement bedroom while a bunch of TM practitioners met in the living room overhead to practice their meditations, or whatever. I couldn't sleep for all the banging and crashing...WHAM! THUD! At supper I asked my host wot in hey they were doing up there...seemed pretty noisy for meditating. She laughed and said they were levitating. Right. I can tell you that they did really well getting off the floor, but they needed some practice on those landings!!

Speaking of meditating, I'm wondering if knitting is an ancient forerunner of transcendental meditation--you know, sitting down and focusing on a mantra (knit one, purl two...). The only difference I can see is that they tell you to close your eyes to meditate. However, LRH and her coterie of fellow accomplished knitters can probably do that, too: Knit with their eyes closed....

Interview with Poet Chris Heuer

Several years ago, the Fall 2003 issue of World Around You (the magazine my friend Cathy conceived and managed for deaf teens) published a short interview I conducted with Chris Heuer, a deaf poet who teaches at Gallaudet. The World Around You website has a longer version of the interview, and I'm posting it here. I found the interview yesterday while going through a bunch of old zip disks as part of my clearout and filing before I retire. Heuer is a neat guy, and I like his poetry.

Heuer is the author of the "Man On The Street" column that appeared in the e-zine Tactile Mind Press Weekly. His poetry and short stories have appeared in No Walls of Stone, The Deaf Way II Anthology, Kaliedoscope Magazine, and in The Tactile Mind quarterlies. The Tactile Mind Press published Heuer's book, All Your Parts Intact: Poetry, in 2004. Another book, Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution, will be published in September, 2007, by Gallaudet University Press. Heuer and his wife, Amy, live in Alexandria, VA.

How and when did you become interested in writing poetry?

In the second grade, my teacher asked the class to write a story to complete the sentence “It was a dark and cloudy day….” Everyone else turned in one-page stories about rainstorms and such. I turned in eight pages (with handwriting on both sides) about mutant rat-men aliens invading the Earth; my friend Terry and I had to fight them off with bows and arrows. That was the first time I ever got a writing rush. Poetry just followed naturally from there.

Has any poet, living or dead, inspired you particularly? What poems do you know by heart? What poems do you like to read?

I really liked the confessional poets. Anne Sexton was a big influence on me. Sylvia Plath was another. I had a lot of influences—Charles Bukowski, Henry Rollins, Stan Rice. “Fire And Ice” (by Robert Frost) is a poem I hope someone reads at my funeral. “Their Share” by Stan Rice reminds me of trying to get through my teenage years. “Which Part Was Me And Which Part Was You” by Orson Scott Card is a poem my wife and I included in our wedding ceremony.

There are lots of ways to write and lots of advice on writing, but tell us….when do you do your writing? Do you write every day? Do you keep a journal? If so, do you use anything from your journal in your poems?

I’m a natural night guy, so I do most of my actual sitting-in-front-of-the-computer-and-pounding-away writing at night. There’s more to it than that, though. Thinking is a part of writing. I am in the constant process of noticing things and interpreting them in my own “voice.” I keep a journal for that reason, but I don’t try to be poetic there. Mostly my journal functions as a diary—it’s straight reporting, things that happened to me, things that are happening in the world. The poetry grows out of that later.

Do you think people have to be in love or miserable to write a poem?

I think a lot of poetry is naturally emotional whether it tries to be or not. I think being depressed or angry is really just a natural reaction to the influences of real life events. You can’t always see those influences, though, so you don’t always know why you’re depressed or angry. Poetry can help you figure that out. A poem doesn’t have to be clear in any sense of the word, but you can connect a lot of loose symbols and images in a poem and end up with a much clearer explanation of why you feel the way you feel than you ever would through straight reporting in a journal. Poetry picks up things hiding in your mind.

What do you think makes a good poem?

For the poet? Honesty. But here’s a twist: A poem can be about a lot more than it seems to be on the surface. Images stand for many things. I remember once reading Anne Rice’s description of a tree. If you look at a tree in one way, Rice said, it’s “a beautiful thing, turning the landscape green. Look at it another way and it’s a root-system monster gobbling up all the water, tyrannically blocking out the sunlight for smaller, frailer flowers.” When you read poetry, you have to decide consciously to suspend judgment and let the poet really speak to you. If you let the emotions as well as the images get through your defenses so you can feel the poet’s frustration or contentment, you’ll walk away from the poem having been opened to something you never saw before. It changes you, and I think that kind of change is a good thing and much needed.

How do you handle sign vs. the written word in your poems?

In my poetry class at Gallaudet, I have my students perform their written poetry in ASL. Sometimes what they don’t capture on the page comes out in the signs, and vice-versa. I also know of an editor, John Lee Clark of the Tactile Mind Press, who actively hunts for hidden ASL signs in English poetry. He thinks such poetry is a very important cultural expression of our art, and I agree with the man wholeheartedly. The deaf community needs poets, and not just ASL poets, either—English language poets. There are so many things waiting to be captured out there, things that deaf teenagers, children, young and old adults alike are all going through. It would be so wonderful to share those things, to have someone pick up your book of poems and realize “Hey, she felt the same way! Wow! I’m not alone in this!” That’s what I strive to do, with love, with anger, with grief, with calmness. I try to share who I am. That’s what I hope to see in poetry every time I pick up a book by a new deaf writer. And that’s starting to happen a lot these days—many voices struggling to really be heard, to really change things! It’s a wonderful, exciting thing! Wouldn’t it be great to be a part of that?

Obviously, people think it’s possible to teach someone how to write a poem, but do you think it’s possible to teach someone how to be a poet?

You can only teach yourself to be a poet—teaching yourself to recognize what is truly you as opposed to what everyone else wants you to be. When you can say, “This is me” when writing about everything from discrimination to a toothbrush to an oily pigeon outside of Union Station, you’re a poet. I can’t teach you how to do that—nobody can. You have to look deep into yourself and pierce all the beliefs that you protect yourself with. Now turn that gaze on the world and tell me what you see. That’s a poem waiting to be written.

Have you taken any classes in writing poetry?

I did—all through college. It was a great time. We had poetry readings in coffee shops, dance halls—you name it. People would come from thirty miles away to hear us read. The other students in the class were SO brutally critical! My God! But it was wonderful for me, because I was awakened from my own narrow-mindedness to those places where I was not being honest and where I was hiding behind other people’s perceptions. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything.

Have you ever taken a workshop in writing poetry? What do you think of the workshop format itself?

Workshops help—definitely! I think the best teachers get out of the way and just become group participants. In my own class (which follows a workshop format), I have everyone sign up to present a poem. They make fifteen copies, hand those copies out to fifteen students, and then perform the poem. The class then critiques the poem and comments on the performance. This is how the poet learns what is not clear, what is a cliché, what is good, and so on. I give my own critiques right along with all of my students and beyond that try to let the class find its own way. I give brief explanations of what meter is, what different forms poetry can take, and I teach them games that help them to come up with metaphors and similes and images. The point is to have a great time and to learn to see in new ways. I really love those kinds of workshops.

You’ve mentioned several “ confessional" poets—people who write about disturbing things. It’s not as if these poets are not popular. They are. Why?

In modern life, everything is sanitized and sterilized. You aren't allowed to see deathly sick people wandering around, or even very, very old people. There is an institution for everything—including deafness, when you think about it. What everyone suspects and fears is true is hidden behind an institutional wall. In a way that's good. Order is kept. Society functions. But in a way it's bad, too, because a very large natural component of healing emotionally and moving on is facing something and accepting it. Since nobody can face it, nobody can accept it. The appeal of confessional poetry for me is that it rips down these society-made barriers. A lot of people keep saying, "This country/world is going to the dogs." They remember the “good old days.” The truth is, the world has always been like this.

Another appeal of confessional poetry is just knowing there's someone else out there who feels the same way you do, who sees the same way you do, who has enough spirit and bravery to say, "...what you think is going on is actually what is going on." I think reading this kind of poetry can be a recovery program, a giant pat on the shoulder—“There, there.” It's comforting. It's validating. It makes you feel less alone.

Is there another side of that argument?

Joseph Campbell argued that we have institutions and rituals and so forth—"coming of age" events like graduation, confirmation, marriage, etc.—to serve as a yardstick for people to measure their progress by. You need that yardstick to keep from being overwhelmed in a world of what would otherwise be senseless data, unconnected information. We coordinate and correlate that information. Marriage is associated with "being at least 18," and not being 13 (in the way it was back in the 1800s). A work day is considered 8 hours, and not 18 or 20 the way it was back in 1910 or even 1920 before labor unions. You didn't get a college degree before you graduated from high school, and you didn't buy your first house before you graduated from college. With institutions, with ritual, with coming-of-age events, we have order instead of chaos. Without that order, chaos is especially destructive.

It's strange how art and technology are often blamed for destructive behavior, when in fact I think that behavior is caused by something much deeper. People lose themselves. It's not "caused" by poetry or technology (the internet, for example) any more than it is caused by everything being swept into an institutional closet and hushed up. It is the tension between these two extremes and the lack of guides on the road between these two extremes that cause people to lose their way.

The line between order and chaos is very confusing. I have just as much trouble finding my way as anyone else, and I've made just as many mistakes. But overall the balance I've found forces me to look as deeply into myself and others as I possibly can, to really look and question which side of the line I'm on at any given moment. I think that's a good thing

Drink Recipe for Lazy Gardener

The Oldest Girl and I were yakking this aft about the par'lous condition of her throat. She's had this flu thing for some time now, and it still hurts to swallow. I told her the only other thing I could think of was her father's nostrum for sore throat: hot lemonade with a good slosh of bourbon.

OG said, "I hate bourbon. What about scotch?"

I knew of no medicinal drinks using scotch, but I said there must be something somewhere that uses lemon juice and scotch in the same drink. After a bit of googling, I found one on the following website:

http://www.easy-mixed-drinks.com/index.php/archives/category/mx/number/feed/

Here's the drink...I can't figure out from the website wot it's called (2nd Wester??) It sounds like it could be pretty lethal to microbes. I don't know who Josh Morgan and the boys are, but they must be wholesome young men.

12.0 oz Cola
3.0 Ice (three ice cubes?)
1.0 Lemon
2.0 Lime
4.0 oz Scotch
Directions:
Get a Mason Jar
Add Ice, Cola, Scotch
Squeeze Lemon Slice into drink and then drop into drink
Repeat with Limes
Cap Mason Jar
Shake and Enjoy
Courtesy of Josh Morgan and the Boys in 236 West

"Mozart Meets Cuba"....

Elvis (not his real name...heh), the audiologist at Johns Hopkins Listening Center, was very pleased with my progress on Wednesday, when I had my one-month checkup. He compared Wednesday's audiogram to the one he took on my first visit, pre-implant, and said, "This is fantastic!" For 250Hz, I scored a 10; for the next four (500Hz-4000Hz), a 20; and for the highest sounds (8000Hz), a 30. This puts my hearing in the "normal" range. Who knew??!! In the old days, the best I could do even with a hearing aid at 250Hz was 75, and all the rest went down past 100, making me profoundly deaf.



He said also that it takes two years for the implant to work at its optimum, and after just one month, I'm not anywhere near my peak efficiency yet. I don't think this means I'm gonna wind up hearing in the dog ranges, but it will mean that the sounds I'm hearing now will be richer and fuller, and speech without lipreading will be more recognizable. Even so, we let the sign language interpreter go, since I no longer need her to understand what Elvis is saying.

He re-mapped the four programs again so that program One will now be my usual setting, and it's both loudest and most sensitive. (Sensitivity picks up background noises.) So if I really want to hear what's going on everywhere, not just straight across a table from me or next to me on the metro, it'll be One. Program Two is about as loud as One, but not as sensitive. Three is fairly soft--less volume, and even less sensitivity--and it's focused. Four is very soft, and I can't imagine ever wanting to use it, but The King said many people prefer Three or even Four all the time. Everything else is too much.

When I got up this a.m., I put on my processor, now set at program One, and headed out. Running late, I grabbed a taxi. After settling in, I realized I was hearing the news on the radio, not the taxi driver: "It's 68 degrees in Washington; the time is 9:07." This means I was not lipreading the newscaster, but I was actually hearing him. Needless to say, I love it.

For practice last night, inspired by a number of things, I put a new disk in my CD player: The Klazz Brothers & Cuba Percussion's "Mozart Meets Cuba"



All I can say is that if I had a mind left, that disk would have blown it. It's Mozart's tunes played with a Cuban flavor by a bunch of jazz musicians. One thing Restak, the author of Mozart's Brain and the Fighter Pilot, says in the chapter on art & music is "Perhaps Mozart can help you develop the ability to engage in multilevel thinking and thus use your brain in more creative ways." Well, what would Mozart played as Cuban jazz do to a brain? I'd say it'd give it a big boost in functioning. We'll see. My memory is still half shot from the three pain-killers I took after the implant surgery, but it's getting better. However, as mental stimulation, listening to "Mozart Meets Cuba" beats the hell out of watching "Throw Down by Bobby Flay" on the Food Network. Genug with the barbeque, already!!

Masspeak

Masspeak, the enormous piles of braided and (mostly black) painted rope Little Red Hen mentions in her current post, "North Dakota Brought Closer," seem nothing like "giant washcloths," as one reviewer called them. Take a look.



Any old housewife is more likely to call this a "dishcloth," and it reaches almost to the ceiling. This old housewife found it kind of terrifying, which is probably grist for the psychoanalytic mill. There could be a horror movie about a dishcloth like this, and there probably is...hmmm...maybe the original "Father Knows Best"?

If you live in NYC, you can go scare yourself by looking at this massive piece of Orly Genger's art at Larissa Goldston Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, 3rd floor. The last day is May 5, 2007. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Saturday, 11 am to 6 pm.

Ufda!

"Plains of Sweet Regret"

The photo above is a video still on the back cover of a gallery handout celebrating The Plains of Sweet Regret, a video installation at Lennon, Weinberg, Inc., 514 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001. Mary Lucier, an American video artist whose work is known internationally, created this installation on commission from the North Dakota Museum of Art. Saturday, April 28, was the last day of the show, so Cathy and I went up there to see it. Sally joined us, as did Naomi Dagen Bloom, known to knitters, peace activists, and bloggers as A Little Red Hen.

Mary Lucier's subject in The Plains of Sweet Regret is North Dakota, where I was raised and Sally was born. The videography of the plains and its present (shown in vivid shots of local rodeos, wheat fields, and farm animals) and former life (shown in the weathered, abandoned farmhouses and barns) was very moving.

I especially loved Lucier's video of a grasshopper, sitting at once alert and calm in a man's hand. We played a lot with grasshoppers as kids in North Dakota, and the brief, sunlit closeups of the insect captured for me the essence of North Dakota: the simplicity of the landscape and the life, the intimate relationship between people and creatures, and the peculiar luminosity of the light, which is very much like the light you see in the New England sky as you approach the ocean.

Naomi, also an installation artist (see CityWorm) and variously described in Google as an "environmental and performance artist" and a "mixed media environmental artist," brought along a copy of her handmade book, Condom Amulets.



The book evolved from one of her present concerns, safe sex for seniors. She promotes condom use (no longer necessary for prevention of pregnancy) for women over 50. She also celebrated Valentine's Day this year by distributing the free NYC Condoms at an icy subway stop near her home.





Sally and Cathy kept the conversation going with Naomi....I was in a new environment nobody told me about at the audiologist's office: New York City. The city pretty much overwhelmed the computer chips in my CI processor, and I didn't know how to adjust it. So...back to smiling and nodding and responding to anything that sounded like English. It was so bad that, at first, I thought I'd wrecked my processor when it fell on the sidewalk yesterday as I changed batteries, thinking that was the problem. But this morning after a quiet night in its dry box, the processor was working again. Scary to be so dependent on such a little object, but that was a good lesson to learn among friendly companions. Thanks, you guys....I could have asked Cathy to interpret for me, but I thought I'd just wade right in and experience the conversation as best I could. Dumb, huh?

O Canada!

I got this notice when I joined Connect2Canada this a.m. The invitation came in the monthly Canadian Arts newsletter of the Canadian Embassy here. The newsletter tells of all the Canadian performers and artists whose work will be available or on display in DC in the month of April.

Meanwhile, just look at these eye openers that were in this morning's communique!

*Canada is the United States' largest source of imported crude oil, more than Saudi Arabia, and Canada has the world's second largest proven oil reserves. Much of that oil is located in the Alberta oilsands, an area that contains at least 175 billions of recoverable oil located under an area approximately the size of New York State (more information).


*We have rotated 15,000 troops in the war on terror, over 40,000 troops through the Balkans since 1991, committed $300 million dollars to reconstruction in Iraq, and are deploying a 2000 troop strong Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar, one of the most dangerous regions in Afghanistan, making Canada the second largest military presence in Afghanistan -- second only to the United States (more information).

*None of the September 11, 2001 terrorists entered the United States from Canada (more information).

*Canada-U.S. trade, at more than $1.5 billion US per day, supports over five million jobs in the United States, and two million in Canada. Our shared Smart Border helps ensure the safe and secure trade of over 200 million border crossings per year (more information).

An indigestion of greenness....

...One must have constantly before one's eyes the very presence of life. the sky, the earth, a piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. That is why one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them. One must take one's good where one finds it....

The painter passes through states of fullness and of emptying. That is the whole secret of art. I take a walk in the forest of Fontainbleu. There I get an indigestion of greenness. I must empty this sensation into a picture. Green dominates in it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge hiimself of his sensations and his visions....

It is not what the artist does that counts, but what he is.... What interests me is the uneasiness of Cezanne, the real teaching of Cezanne, the torments of van Gogh, that is to say the drama of the men.


-from Picasso's Guernica: the Genesis of a Painting (U. of California, 1962)

The Book as Art

http://www.nmwa.org/exhibition/detail.asp?exhibitid=150

Click on this link to see a sample of the fabulous "The Book as Art" exhibition currently showing at the National Museum of Women in Art in DC. The interactive page turner feature is so great! Alas, the exhibit itself runs only through February 4, 2007. I finally got to see it this afternoon, and it is one of the best and most mind-blowing art exhibits I've ever seen anywhere.

It's been especially enjoyable for me personally to see these marvelous handmade books. One of my first attempts to write a book resulted not only in writing the story but also in making it into a physical book, as well, in collaboration with Sister David, C.S.J., aka Martha Greenwood, a graduate of St. John's Academy in Jamestown, ND, in 1954. Martha and I were born 16 days apart in December, 1936, and we both entered the community of the Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, St. Paul, MN, on September 8, 1954. As novices, we were assigned at various times to work in the library. This involved not only typing a book pocket for the back of each new book but also repairing books. We learned how to make a book from scratch by replacing torn covers and reinserting loose pages. Martha did the fabulous calligraphy for this book...I forget the exact title...Agnes...maybe? She also did the calligraphy for our second and final book, but goddess knows what the title of THAT one was. We left the books behind when we left the convent...I in 1959, Martha a few years later. The books probably bit the dust somewhere along the way.

Martha is now a wife, mother of three children, and grandmother of three, also, including the fabulous Ruby, age 9. She is retired from long service as a teacher of English as a second language with the public schools in her town and is currently several years deep into a collossal family history project. A vastly talented artist and musician, she gave up both while raising her family. Now she's passed on some of her gifts to Ruby by teaching her to play both the recorder and the violin. She also is probably the very best cook I'm privileged to know personally. When they moved into their present house, they tore out half the downstairs and made it into a kitchen, complete with a commercial range (six burners, two ovens, and a raised griddle).