EVERYTHING...and its Opposite

"Everything and their opposite" is a phrase found in a letter from my uncle, Louis Kamp (Louie.)

 It was something his wife, my aunt Renie (my father's sister, Irene Kittle Kamp) used to frequently refer to...this I discovered in that letter from Louie, Louie himself having depths of interest in science and other adventurous speculations, of which I have many examples noted in letters over the years. Louie was also a very funny guy and an artist. At one time, when I was a still pretty young, Renie was Editor of Seventeen Magazine, something I thought quite glamorous. During this time they lived in an apartment in New York City but had a summer place in Hampton Bays out in Long Island. My parents and my sister and I would sometimes drive out from where we lived in Merrick to visit them there, and it was on one of those visits, probably one August, when we were all sitting outside under a fabulous array of stars. And Louie said at one point, "One of those stars might be an atom in Bobo's leg" (Bobo being my cousin, who was a couple of years younger than me.) I was very struck by this comment, something that still seems fascinating, and especially, I liked hearing this in a setting that included me, as a child. This was around early 1950s. Many years later,  when Louie was nearing age 90, he sent me a wonderful book, The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot, which seemed then and seems now linked in its essence with Louie's years-back comment. I am going to add Louie's letter to this post, will photograph it and then post it. It's quite nice to read, and is interesting visually too....meanwhile, more about Louie and Renie and their interesting house and point of view:

As an artist back then, Louis fashioned small "constructions" out of discarded bits of wood into sailboats that he roughly nailed together, painted in a monochromed color, and affixed over the doorways here and there. These I liked very much. He and Renie also had pages from The Old Man and The Sea, some particular bit of text they must have loved, which he had photostatted, enlarged and made into wallpaper in one of the rooms: white letters on dark blue background.

Renie and Louie were unique in our family...they were both writers, had been writing partners during the 1940s and 50s, doing short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and later writing screenplays together (The Sandpiper and The Lion among others.) They both also wrote plays. Renie's play, The Great Indoors, "had a brief Broadway run in 1966", as noted in her obituary.

As with many writers, their letters are full of interest, kind of like a flowing autobiography. They moved many years back to Los Angeles so we didn't see them that often, but kept in touch via letters and occasional phone calls.

Here is a photo from the day they were married, in 1945:

I am going to include shortly some excerpts of letters they'd sent over the years, and more photos, but first would like to tell about a couple of my favorite fairy tales, because each is a case where opposites somehow conspire to make something happen.

Here's a synopsis of each:

1. The Soup Stone (a Grimm's Fairy Tale)

Basically, this is a tale of a resourceful fellow, without appreciable means in life, who cleverly, as he walks along the road from one town to another, picks up a particularly smooth and rounded stone and puts it in his pocket. He approaches a village (one such as appears in many a fairy tale, set in the unspecified past.) He goes into a tavern across from the village green and has himself a nice beer or cider and gets to talking to the habitues there and gradually gets around to telling them of a magic stone he has in his pocket that is able to make soup! They are intrigued and yet doubtful and jesting about it, and he ends up challenging them to a testing of the soup stone's powers. They agree. He tells them all is needed is a fire built opposite the tavern in a clear place on the green, and a large caldron. This is done, and the water soon is boiling in the caldron. He suggests they amuse themselves with telling stories while the soup magic happens. And then he says, does anyone have an onion by chance?  And the tavern owner's wife says yes, here's an onion...and then someone else who has her shopping basket with her offers a potato or two, and someone else has a few herbs handy...and then another person says, well, here's a hambone I just picked up at the market...and as they were all drinking the beer and the cider, merriment prevailed and the smell of the onions and herbs and ham were most appealing...suddenly...it was soup!  And all partook of it and raved about it...and said to the guy, where on earth did you get this magic stone...and he said oh, it's so wonderful, I'm so lucky to have it...and they began to try to persuade him to part with it, eventually, offering him money for it.  and eventually, he agreed, acting as though he regretted it, but they were so persuasive, etc. They all gave him a cheer when he went to leave, and as he walked down the road, with a full stomach, he noted a nice looking stone by the side of the road, picked it up, dusted it off, and put it in his pocket as he wended his way to the next little village, with a few coins jingling in his pocket for perhaps an overnight stay in a nice little inn.

To summarize: First there is nothing. Then something materializes.

A cover of one of the Grimm's Fairy Tales editions:

This next one was written by Oscar Wilde...


2. The Happy Prince

This story is set in a European city of great beauty, wherein a lovely gold statue of a prince graces the public square, a young man whose eyes are gemstones...and of which the townspeople and the mayor are inordinately proud. A sweet-natured bird, a swallow, comes often to sit with the statue, sheltering in its nooks and crannies against the wind sometimes, and she comes to know and talk with the prince. She tells him stories of the town, some of them sad, people who are hungry, a poet writing in a little garret, things like that. And he feels similarly as she, that something should be done for these people. Suddenly he gets the idea that she can take some of the gold leaf from his garments and bring them to the unfortunate people she has noticed. She does so, and comes back and exclaims at how happy, how relieved the people were in every case at the unexpected bounty. Finally, the gold is all gone from his being, and only the lead remains. There are still the gemstones in his eyes, and these too he persuades her to carry off to those in need. Finally, all is dark and she still sits with him...and the mayor comes forth and sees the dreariness of the statue, and says to his retinue to go and carry the now undistinguished statue to the smelter to be melted down (and probably to be replaced with another resplendent figure.) And as they carry the prince away, the swallow goes with him...and when all is melted, there is something unmeltable left in the ashes...a heart.

I just love this story...this above is my own recollection of it, there may be some details I have not remembered correctly, but the essence is there.

 Here's an illustration from the book:

Illustration for the first edition by Walter Crane

Here again: a "something", which due to a wonderful kind of goodness, became nothing, and then morphed into a much bigger something.

Awhile ago I heard about a book which sounded intriguing and ordered it from Amazon: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, written by Donovan Hohn. It is a case where the rubber ducks were set loose from a container ship (not on purpose) and as they were fellow creatures of a common design, they grouped together inexorably and formed a giant phalanx of sweetness and unexpected majesty and traveled resolutely around the world's seas. I had also  heard of a similar floating mass of garbage (or for a nicer term, flotsam and jetsam), much of it composed also of plastics, which was abroad on the ocean and traveling day and night with no particular destination. Its formal name is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Each bit of the garbage not much by itself, but together it was/is massive and very much itself.

A last bit of detail from my own world-view: I have noticed when doing laundry that garments of a similar fabric sometimes gather together in the dryer, as though old friends refound...sox in particular seem to like to do this.

Some excerpts of letters from Renie and Louie will be added here soon...

THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW...

SLEEPY HOLLOW is always associated with my grammar school days, in Long Island...

I love the 40s...I like the music (especially the jazz of those days, the kind of jazz I still like, even though I was a mere sprig in those days!)  I heard the music and I saw the movies, because my parents took my sister Cynthy and me many a time to local theatres, first to what was an old former vaudeville house in Freeport, Long Island (a town next to our town, Merrick) which had now morphed into a movie theatre. (My mother saw Sophie Tucker and Eddie Cantor at various times in that same theatre during the vaudeville years.)  Later on, in the 1950s, we went to a wonderful art movie house in Malverne, another Nassau County town, where we saw early Alec Guinness films (Kind Hearts and Coronets) and Somerset Maugham short stories made into films, such as Quartet. I remember that when we were in Freeport, we often went and had dinner in a little restaurant near the theatre, Bouloukos, where my sister always ordered the egg salad sandwich and chocolate ice cream (I can't remember what I liked.)  In Malverne, there was a local tavern which had a marvelous hamburger and french fried onions where we went before or after the movie, food linked with a movie always a good idea.

Will digress once again...when in grammar school but just old enough to go on a Saturday jaunt by myself with my friends, we, my girlfriends and I, would take a bus down Merrick Avenue to the Long Island Railroad Station, and go one stop to Freeport, where the matinee ticket was $.25.and the transportation costs minimal compared to today!...all this I can well remember, as it kind of fit with the informal sort of allowance I had in those days. Not only was it "affordable" by myself and my friends, but we were allowed by the management of the movie theatre to stay and watch the whole movie (often a double feature which they had in those days) for a second time, turning the whole day into a many-hours event. My girlfriends and I went to view one particular movie, "Milllion Dollar Mermaid" several times one particular Saturday, a movie starring  Esther Williams about the life of Vaudeville star,  Annette Kellerman, a champion swimmer who appeared in a giant "fishtank" on stage.)

From Wikipedia about Annette Kellerman:

"Kellerman was famous for advocating the right of women to wear a one-piece bathing suit, which was controversial at the time. According to an Australian magazine, ‘In the early 1900s, women were expected to wear cumbersome dress and pantaloon combinations when swimming.’ In 1907, at the height of her popularity, Kellerman was arrested on Revere Beach, Massachusetts, for indecency - she was wearing one of her fitted one-piece costumes."

So at the end of the movie, Kellerman was swimming in the tank and the glass broke and all hell broke loose as we, my friends and I, burst into tears. When the same happened again the second time we saw the movie that day, we totally enjoyed the subsequent outburst of tears, finding it a most satisfying day!

And back to SLEEPY HOLLOW...

In school, same years, same friends, we had a principal, Mr. Zachary, who took a very formal approach to our weekly assemblies: he would wait till we were all assembled in our seats (glad for the respite from classroom struggles) and he would enter the gym with a swift walk through the assembled seats up to the stage where he would lead the Pledge of Allegience, followed by a reading from the Bible (as it was the 1940s, this was normal procedure in schools.) When he finished these, the "entertainment" of whatever sort, would ensue. Sometimes a school play. Sometimes something like a documentary, one of which was titled "America's Garbage"...we saw this movie a number of times whenever no other movie was available. Huge pictures of dump trucks heaping loads of stuff into other vehicles...and a stentorian voice hailing "America's garbage" as if it were a national product. Still, we were glad to be there watching something, anything other than being back in the classroom! But the one thing, one and all, every one of us, hailed with pleasure, was when they brought out from the mothballs the great black and white cartoon of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

I can remember it very well (and wish I could view it now!):  Ichabod Crane and a bunch of people all in a barn somewhere, dancing, and the floorboards bouncing up and down quite jauntily as they danced. Then, the scary scene outdoors, the dark of night, as the gangly and vulnerable-looking Ichabod was going home on his horse and saw a terrifying figure coming towards him, the headless horseman. This black and white cartoon so very dramatic, full of wonderful graphic imagery, the figures dancing in the barn so rounded and cheery, then the scene outside, in the night...

So back again to SLEEPY HOLLOW...

This is a new television series this fall. Because of my memory of the cartoon, I felt intrigued to watch the first episode and found it quite wonderful. Without going on at too great length, there is a blending of past and present in Sleepy Hollow, so much of it filmed at night and so beautifully. Here is a quote from the NY Times review of the show:

From Neil Genzlingers’s review in the New York Times, September 15, 2013

“An Ichabod Crane With Backbone (but Can He Use an iPad?)”

“... Fox’s “Sleepy Hollow” gets the new television season off to an outlandish and rather entertaining start on Monday night as Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman of Washington Irving’s 193-year-old short story turn up in the 21^st century. “

I include several photos here which relate to all the above:

1. In the Metropolitan Museum’s Medieval galleries is a limestone figure “carved and painted about 1225-75”. Titled  “Saint Firmin Holding His Head”, St. Firmin was the fourth century missionary who became the first bishop of Amiens (France) and the patron saint of that city. “Here the saint is shown as if living while holding his decapitated head. This statue is said to have come from the destroyed bishop’s palace at Amiens.”
   

2. A photo of one of the Metro North trains I take in to New York, often finding odd and interesting names painted on the side of the various cars of the train. This particular car was the Ichabod Crane, and I was happy to nab a photo of it. (On another occasion, one of the cars was the Eleanor Roosevelt.)

3. This last picture here is something I found right here in Branford. Along a curving road, I several times have noticed an odd sight: a house with a front door that faces the road, and a second, identical, door, on the side of the house, visible from the street, this door looking ordinary in every way except that it hovers over a drop of about 10 feet, no steps down to the ground below. I post the picture here, but now think that this little building is a garage. It does have another "front door" to the right of the garage doors, but this door to nowhere looks so forlorn. (Note that of necessity I have to take the picture while driving, so can't fuss much with getting best shot.) I do like that it, like the headless figure, defies logic.

LOOSE ENDS...Lucia and Nya Nya

It's come to my attention that there are two names that are a bit mystifying to people who've come upon them: 1) My Name is Nya Nya (the name of this blog), and 2) Studio Lucia, the online store on Etsy.
These are both newly-minted enterprises for me, as well as the new and only website:
http://www.aksellon.com

So it seemed there should be some explanation of Nya Nya and Lucia. This blog came to be called My Name is Nya Nya because of a funny comment by my granddaughter, Maren, when we were all sitting at the dinner table. She long back had decided to call me Nya Nya. First it was to be Granny Sandy...then it transformed to Nya Nya. Maren had been given a book by her aunt, my daughter Daria, a book about a little dog that looked like an invention by a toy company. The book was Boo, the Life of the World's Cutest Dog, and the dog was endlessly photogenic, its life fairly nice, being cared for with lots of oomph and photographed in similar fashion. The first line of the book goes: "My name is Boo.This is My Life". When I said something indicating my own approach to various facets of life,  my granddaughter remembered the book and said: "My name is Nya Nya, and this is my life".  Then she said: "Nya Nya likes paper towels and hot water."  Very true: I have the habit of drinking a glass of hot water before going to bed at night, and use an inordinate lot of paper towels when visiting them, as well as here at home. I chastise myself for doing so, yet find nothing to substitute for their readiness and comparative pristine nature. I have to admit I like them.

So here is a picture of one of the very same dogs as Boo in the book, but this one I photographed in my local laundromat, where its human guardian brings the little guy in with her when she does her laundry. Here he sits perched in one of the laundry carts, cozily ensconced in a dog bed atop the folded laundry:

Now to Lucia, of Studio Lucia...

My cat Luchy, as I called her, was a very sensitive creature, not an extrovert...but possessive of a subtlety and gentleness and vulnerability that I quite loved. Thinking of her brings to mind a wonderful children's book, Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gag, one of my favorites. Here's a picture of the cover of the book and the title page, which indicates a publication date of 1928:











And here is Luchy, who was a Cornish Rex. She's sniffing some African daisies which were her favorite flowers, in that she attempted to eat the petals if allowed.

More to come soon of cats, dogs, kits, cats, sacks, wives...and how many were going to St. Ives...

Many Threads to Consider...

Some of the threads: my parents and my grandmother, Nana One of the pictures of my mother that I love is herself at the wheel of a Ford car (not sure Model A or Model T, but an early-days Ford.) She learned to drive at age 15, and later drove herself to work from Long Island to the elementary school in Queens where she taught at the very same school for 46 years. In 1927, she and Dad were engaged but not yet married, having to wait till they could afford to get married, as was the case for many during those years. They were to make a trip somewhere together, with Nana as chaperone, or something like that...I may remember this wrong, maybe not as chaperone, maybe they were just going somewhere on a trip and were bringing her there as well??  My grandfather, Papa, was a commercial artist and one of his yearly gigs was that he would once a year do the menu covers and brochures for Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz. He would be invited to come and stay and make photographs for reference in order to do the paintings and fine lettering when he got back to his home studio. I had for many years his drawing board of ancient vintage, which had a pattern of holes all over it, like a field of stars created by innumerable pins holding down drawing paper. I used it when I was at Pratt and now one of my daughters has it in her home, where it is now a veritable antique.  But back to the trip: I heard this story many a time, but most importantly, it had to do with the friendship (the cementing of) between Nana and Dad: the son in law of the future. Where exactly they were driving does not stay fixed in my mind, but the road they traveled on was the Pulaski Skyway. Hearing these words, seeing them on the page conjures up a sense of danger to me...my concept of something called a Skyway sounds like an elaborate structure curving up into the heavens, something upon which you would not like to be driving an old Ford or other car. I plan on looking at a map and seeing if possibly Mohonk was where they could have been headed on this trip. I believe it was at night, am pretty sure of that, because Dad told me (or us, I should say, around the dinner table) that he, with difficulty in the dark of night, discovered there was a leak in the gas tank...and expressed the worry that there was no way to fix it unless there was something to plug the leak, and what possibly could any of them have with them that would do it. And Nana, in the back seat, proclaimed that she did have something. In those years, apparently Listerine came in little bottles with corks in the top, not like the newfangled caps on things we have today. And the great news was the little cork saved the day, or the night, and on they went on the Pulaski Skyway, all greatly pleased! Here are some photos...the first is one of the brochure-covers Papa did for Mohonk in 1925. The second: is Dad and Mom in a canoe on the lake; notice the characteristic little roofed look-out sheds that Mohonk had all over the trails leading up to the mountaintop. The third picture is one Papa had taken of the whole of Mohonk from a distance away, all the buildings which abutted the lake and fit into the landscape. Another family thread, first mentioned in an earlier post, was that of Russell & Volkening, the literary agents my Aunt Connie worked for, for 30 years (see the Post: My Aunt Connie and Adventure Magazine, May 25, 2013) I have Connie's copy of the book called Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell, right here on my bookshelf, and think the review below says a lot about how important and wonderful a good agent (or a good anything) becomes for us, who find the most hope and encouragement in our lives via the specially good human beings we've been lucky enough to meet. Here's the review, written by Christopher Carduff in The New Criterion, Volume 80. Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell Michael Kreyling Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 216 pages, $21.95 "In May 1940, when she received her first letter from Diarmuid Russell, Eudora Welty was thirty-one years old and the author of a dozen short stories that had appeared, usually without payment, in little magazines and campus quarterlies. Russell, then thirty-seven, was a former editor at Putnam's, fired for protesting a contract that exploited a young author's ignorance. His letter to Welty was one of the first he had written as a partner in Russell & Volkening, the literary agency he had founded that spring at the urging of Maxwell Perkins. "Dear Miss Welty," he began, "I write to you to see if you might need the services of an agent. I suppose you know the parasitic way an agent works taking 10% of the author's takings. He is rather a benevolent parasite because authors as a rule make more when they have an agent than they do without one." "Yes," replied Welty, "be my agent. Just as [your] letter was given to me, I finished a story, and holding one in each hand, it seemed inevitable." What did not seem inevitable, and what indeed remains extraordinary, is the long association that was to follow. It was a shrewdly-run business venture, it was a candid critical dialogue, but it was also something more: a loyal, long-distance friendship that spanned thirty-three years —some thick, many thin—ending only with Russell's death in 1973. That this alliance between artist and agent was the great treasure of both their working lives is evident from their correspondence, which Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, has fashioned into an appealing book. The letters tell, always with a touch of humor, the story of both the difficult rise of a dedicated, unprolific, tough-to-market writer and the degeneration of the publishing profession into the contemporary "book biz." "If Welty has survived against the odds of literary America," writes Kreyling, "Russell deserves much of the credit." It was he who first placed her in national magazines, who saw the novel in the story that became Delta Wedding, who squeezed every cent out of anthologists, adapters, and paperback re-printers in the fallow years between The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955) and Losing Battles (1970). "His terms were not uncertain," remembers Welty; "you knew how well he liked something and how well he didn't. I just can't tell you what it meant to me to have him there. His integrity, his understanding, his instincts—everything was something I trusted." In this age of publishing by conglomerate, in which the role of the editor is an ever diminishing thing, the writer's closest ally has become his agent. Diarmuid Russell in his letters shows the best that an agent can be. One hopes that the model he provides in this book will draw to his profession a few young people whose taste for literature is matched by real business savvy. The survival of the serious writer in America—of today's young Eudora Weltys—may well depend on them."

FAMILY HISTORY (but via digressions)

I want very much to tell the blog more about my cousins Nick and Jim and will do so soon, and also, more about my Aunt Connie and her life in New York, much of it working for literary agents, Russell & Volkening. But first, I thought of something funny this morning and wanted to put it down on paper, or the illuminated world of the computer monitor.

My local supermarket has had a promotion going on for several months: one accumulates points by buying groceries, then you're allowed to choose from a variety of chef's knives and other implements. As I had arrived at the suitable number of points, I selected what looked exactly like one of the fine culinary instruments seen on the Food Network. Have had it for a month now but have not taken it out of its sheath. I seem to feel it is hazardous to use, however ridiculous this seems. And so several other things came to mind:

One is my favorite radio person of all time: Jean Shepherd. To go back to the Pratt Institute years, I'd been made to know about Shepherd by the abovementioned Aunt Connie, a person often awake late at night (and enjoying same), and I, a freshman student who commuted daily, Long Island to Brooklyn, also awake into the night, grappling with sophisticated art assignments and trying to fend off the dreaded spectre of flunking out. (There are/were several fellow students from that freshman year that I still remember as intelligent and nice people who were suddenly gone, and I determined, fiercely, to stay, hanging on by my fingernails.) In line with this, Bob and Ray on their radio program used to end each show by saying: "Write if you get work, and hang by your thumbs". So I am appending here a picture of me in those years which I'd sent to Connie, with the notation, "Hanging by my thumbs!"

Digression itself was Jean Shepherd's trademark mode, a fact to which he referred frequently. I remember hearing the following story on his late-night radio program on WOR. It ran overnight in those years, he would often tell of driving in from New Jersey to do the show and going home in the morning. This particular story was about the "depression glass" given out in movie theatres in the 1930s, the weekly gift bringing out  bunches of appreciative movie-goers. Shepherd explained that every week, another piece of a large glassware set would be the featured item. After several weeks, a gravy boat was the gift. But the next week, again it was a gravy boat...and the week after that, again a gravy boat. The audience became furious and the management advised them that the following week, if they would just bring in all the excess gravy boats, they would be replaced with suitable items. When the next week came and the disappointing words were said, that there were no replacement items, a slew of gravy boats (in the transparent glass known as "depression glass", now prized by collectors) came hurtling at the screen. Shepherd called it a triumph of collective action and theatricality.

There are books of Shepherd's collected short stories:  A Fistful of Fig Newtons;  In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash;  Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters; and The Ferrari in the Bedroom, all published by Broadway Books. Reading them brings back details I still remember hearing on the radio back then, such as the 4th of July that his father's silk pongee shirt had an altercation with fireworks! I like the following quote in the front of the Fig Newtons book: "Only the centipede recognizes the five thousand footsteps of his grandfather..." - Banacek

There are also audio books, the actual radio programs, many of which I must have heard in those anxiety-ridden days striving to keep afloat at Pratt. Shepherd's audio books are produced by "Radio Again" and can be found at:   www.RadioAgain.com

To go back to the the chef's knives, they reminded me of the depression glass giveaway, but now a further analogy: a story of James Thurber's which appeared in the book, My Life and Hard Times.

A quote from the book:

"My mother, for instance, thought - or, rather knew - that it was dangerous to drive an automobile without gasoline: it fried the valves, or something. 'Now don't you dare drive all over town without gasoline!' she would say to us when we started off. Gasoline, oil and water were much the same to her, a fact that made her life both confusing and perilous."

My hesitation about the the undoubtedly excellent chef's knife may make me a kindred spirit with Mrs. Thurber.

You can read the wonderful My Life and Hard Times via this link:

http://www.sanjuan.edu/webpages/rvolzer/files/My%20Life%20and%20Hard%20Times.pdf

FAMILY HISTORY...

I have been working on a project for quite a few years, which is to clarify, codify and give homage to many small bits of paper (including photographs and letters) which bear witness to the lives of various members of my family, stretching back in time.

 To start with, I'll illustrate this process with two photos of boxes assembled to do this organizing:

The painting over the plastic boxes in this picture is one I had done years ago in Nantucket. It's fitting that it's there because it represents my other enjoyable preoccupations: drawing in ink, painting with watercolors and chalk, and taking photos. The doing of this blog is very much in accord with these: an attempt to get closer to nature and its mysteries, including those of human nature.

Here is another photo of the boxes, which also include cardboard file boxes...I will add some photos of them too, not as decorative as these plastic boxes with their neat labels, but labeled they are with various couples' names and eras.

Since writing this above, I am very sorry to say that my cousin, Nick Roach, has passed away. It was Nick and another cousin, Jim Keegan, who initiated me into this wonderful process of stepping back, bit by bit, into the past to revisit and connect with each our branches of the family. They had begun the process by both researching things on Ancestry.com and then I was fortunate enough to be included in this backing and forthing of found photos and letters which we each had discovered and then shared...

So more, then, about Nick and Jim in the next post...

William Wegman

I just reread a wonderful article found in my favorite publication in the world: The New York Times. Written by Roberta Smith, it appeared on Friday, August 17, 2012 in the New York edition of the Times, and was about artist William Wegman. Titled: "Postcards in an Artist's Journey", it was a review of his show, "William Wegman: Hello Nature" at Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. I so wish I had seen the show...

First I have to confess to having an extraordinary lot of clippings saved over time for which am always trying to establish some filing system that will let me find a particular thing again. And this particular one (see photo below, page C25):

is missing its first page (probably C1) but nonetheless holds the genes of what so interested me. It was buried amongst a whole bunch of intriguing things, and always when I pick one up from the pile, I have the vain hope of possibly throwing something away, and then find that rather than heading for demise in the wastebasket, the item in hand instead expands and fills the exact same vessel of time and attention as the original moment of first contact...the special rapport I feel with many of these clippings reminds me of shells picked up on the water's edge, where their nature, their geometry, perfect or jagged, modest or spectacular, bespeaks of larger matters (like fractals, for example.)

The "Postcards" article was enhanced by the kind of videos which often accompany New York Times articles online. One particular one that seems the absolute essence of what it is to be an artist: click on the photo of the sleeping dog, "William Wegman's Wilderness". I love it so much and love everything about this article. Am liking William Wegman very much, so very enjoyable to watch him opening windows in his Maine cabin, and starting to work on a picture.

Here's the link to the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/arts/design/william-wegman-hello-nature-at-bowdoin-college-museum.html?pagewanted=all

And more about fractals in a future post...