Martin Puryear (b. 1941) is my new favorite living artist. In  late September, Bob and I were invited to the MFA Boston's special opening of his retrospective, "Nexus," thanks to sculptor Elizabeth King, a good friend, who lent a small piece to the show. It had  been given to her in an exchange by Puryear. We'd watched a preview on a Zoom presentation for MFA members, but seeing it all for real was a reminder of how inadequate online viewing is, especially when trying to experience three-dimensional objects. Over his fifty-year career, Puryear has worked in wood, marble, cast iron, aluminum, brick, rawhide, and with found objects. He has also been commissioned to make big public artworks. Some of the forty-five pieces in this show are about his love of nature (Elizabeth's falcon, for instance, seen on the wall on the right). Others are about the history of African Americans -- like the Sally Hemings piece (that Bob is looking at). Shown at the Venice Biennale in 2019, it consists of the form of a long, pleated skirt in white marble literally penetrated by a rusty pole topped by an oversized wrist shackle. More eloquent than any number of books on the subject, it does not have a "face," only a kind of exploitable "body."
      In 1977, Puryear's Brooklyn studio caught fire and he lost a body of work. He moved on. Like being ill or downed by an injury for a period of time (see my essay "The Bedridden Artist"), an experience like that can be devastating for anyone, or it can be seized as an opportunity, in which old ways of being are jettisoned, and new ways are imagined and embraced. That was Puryear's response, as noted in a wall label.
       The red piece in the background is titled "Big Phrygian,"  after the curved cap worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome and later adopted by American revolutionaries and then French ones as a symbol of defiance and liberty. It was at first off-putting to me. It seemed almost alive, like a living, breathing animal, and perhaps not serious enough for its weighty theme, since, being oversize, its tone is almost comical. Elizabeth's dignified falcon, by contrast, immediately drew me, as I tried to imagine how wonderful it must be to live with it as she does, when it's back home in Richmond. But once "Big Phrygian" grabbed me, I found it hard to look away.  I find it pure Puryear: a quietly profound signature piece, eminently hopeful and, yes, humorous in an impish way. Try stifling that, it seems to say.

     “We don’t care what we eat.” So a friend once said to me of her family. I nodded, but, hopefully, hid my disdain. I come from a family where, for example, a first cousin and another first cousin’s wife, finding themselves in a situation where they couldn’t cook dinner one night decided to get a take-out pizza from one of the chains. They’d never before done such a thing, but said to themselves: How bad could a chain pizza be? When they got it home and each had had a bite, their reaction was to put the rest of it back in the box, place it on the floor, and stomp on it.
    Along with the pizza stompers and many other relatives of mine, as well as some specially invited like-minded friends, I have been attending an annual timpano party at the home of another first cousin, in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, whenever I can. It has taken place for nearly twenty years, that is, ever since the film Big Night came out, in 1996. along with a cookbook detailing the way to make a timpano of one’s own. Madelyn, who hosts the party with her husband, Richard, is friends with someone related to Stanley Tucci, who plays one of the brothers in the film. Who knows? Without that celebrity assist, the tradition probably wouldn’t have started.
    We gather to make the timpano in the morning, taking turns rolling by hand the pasta dough that creates the “drum.” It goes into a very large ceramic-glazed steel bowl with the pasta dough overlapping its edges. We then fill it with cubes of provolone, hard salami, and hard-boiled eggs, tiny meatballs, and al dente ziti or other pasta shape coated with tomato sauce and sprinkled with parmigiano reggiano. The overlapping pasta creates the top of it, and the drum is sealed.
    After the timpano goes into the oven, we play bocci or go for walks or, most recently, play ladder golf as it bakes, then eat it in the afternoon. Everyone brings delicacies to accompany it. This time one of the pizza stompers brought freshly dug clams from Maine, where she lives. We also drink wine and speciality coffees made by Rich with his espresso machine. For me, there was a perfect cappuccino and some homemade Amarone from grapes that came from California. Who’s ever heard of homemade wine being delicious? The maker, Gene, a friend rather than a cousin, explained how he learned to make it from a guy who went to M.I.T. and, Gene claimed, invented the eyeglass lenses that turn into sunglasses when you go outside. Apparently, making good homemade vino is a kind of rocket science.
​     A gathering of this kind is certainly a throwback to the days of our aunts and uncles and grandparents, except for the timpano. I can say with certainty that the older generation lived and died without having heard of it, much less having made it. But it doesn’t matter. We are all in our seventies and eighties now and understand that traditions undergo change. For example, Madelyn and Richard say they are planning to move from their historic house, called Eddy Place, and its 90+ acres, and no one else has a place big enough to host it. They claimed in 2024 that that would be the last timpano party, except it obviously wasn’t. And I don't see any signs of them making real plans to move. Who can give up the eggs bought around the corner, the meat (same deal), the vegetables and fruits grown on their own land and nearby? “You live in one big farm stand,” my husband told Madelyn. And how can Richard, a fifth-generation cabinetmaker, give up his huge workshop in a large, former barn on the property—let alone his work? I have a feeling we will be having more timpano parties in North Brookfield for a few more years to come.

​     I’ve known enough book collectors by now to realize my shelf of tennis books is not a true collection. It’s simply a working library of books I read and re-read. One of them, The Inner Game of Tennis, published in 1974 by W. Timothy Gallwey, was the first purchase I made. This was before I started playing tennis. It had been recommended to me by a friend, who was a concert pianist and composer. He said it helped him with his music-making. He had learned about it from another friend, an aspiring soprano, who said it helped her with her singing. And so I sought it out, hoping it would help me become a better writer. It was 1979, I was twenty-seven, and my first short story had just been published by Joyce Carol Oates’s literary magazine, The Ontario Review, but I was having trouble writing another. I needed guidance. I read how-to books about writing, but found them too market-oriented and formulaic. I also read writers’ biographies, but found they all had sad endings. (My future writing teacher, John Barth, would reiterate this notion, suggesting we skip the last chapters of these literary lives.) Happily, I discovered in The Inner Game the valuable advice to ignore the analytical, critical Self One in favor of the non-judgmental, non-verbal Self Two.
     I am now seventy-three, and my library of tennis books includes many other classics of the game that have helped me not only with writing but also with tennis, which I eventually took up as a major pastime, in 1987, after I won a week at a tennis academy. It happened because I was at the 1986 U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows as a guest of my parents, who were both good amateur tennis players and frequent attendees at the tournament. Since reading The Inner Game, I had dabbled a bit in the sport—I had even bought a tennis racquet, a wooden one—and seeing the professionals playing for real instead of on TV was illuminating. It was also emotionally exhausting and at one point, I took a break to wander around the exhibitors’ booths. One of them displayed a sign saying: “Pick a Winner to Be a Winner.” Its challenge was to pick the winners of both the men’s and women’s competition; successful pickers would be put into a raffle pool to win the tennis-academy week. I picked Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl, simply because they were the biggest names that season. Then I completely forgot about it until a few months later when a registered letter came through my mail slot. My husband and I thought it was a hoax. Who’s Nick Bolletieri? we wondered. When we realized it was legitimate, we both arranged to spend a week at the Nick Bolletieri Tennis Academy (now world-famous as IMG Tennis Academy) in Bradenton, Florida. Bob went as a paying customer, but it cost only $700 for the week’s lessons and drills, a two-bedroom condo, and three meals a day, plus an evening out to see the sunset at a bar. And there were only two others on court with us; a third was injured within hours and went home.
     I have been playing both outdoors and indoors without pause ever since. I believe it was Nabokov who recommended that every person have two passions for a satisfactory life. His were writing and butterflies. Mine became writing and tennis. For three reasons I found the sport the perfect activity for my non-writing hours. First, it got me up and out of my desk chair to exercise. I had tried running, but on each excursion I easily grew bored; I realized early on that I needed a bear chasing me in order to keep me motivated. Tennis opponents became the bear. Second, tennis has rules. At the time I began to play, I was getting my short stories declined with words like, “Too contrived-seeming, we think.” Seriously? Besides being a rejection, it was a badly written sentence. In tennis, there were no subjective opinions: the ball was in or out. I could live with that. In fact, I thrived on it. Third, when you get even a little good at tennis it can be aesthetically pleasing to play.
     In addition to tennis, my parents played golf, and eventually that took over as their singular sports passion. I remember once noticing on a visit home that their bookshelves were loaded with how-to, instructional golf books, plus a single novel: Of Human Bondage. (Who knows? Maybe the title led them to believe it, too, was a golf book...) I went through my own phase of buying and reading instructional tennis books, but have found time and again that they were of far less value to me than The Inner Game and a few others whose focus is, like Gallwey’s book, on the mental aspects of the game.
    True collectors like to boast about the highlights of their collections. My library has only one so-called high spot: a first edition, first printing, of John McPhee’s Levels of the Game. Published in 1969, this gift from a rare-book dealer friend is a brilliant, double profile of pros Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner that uses as its “plot” device a point-by-point analysis of a match they played at Forest Hills in 1968. The other books I wouldn’t exactly call low spots, but they are easily found on Amazon today. Of these my favorites are: one of the best sports autobiographies I’ve ever read, Open by Andre Agassi, ghost-written by J. R. Moehringer and published in 2009; David Foster Wallace’s posthumous collection of essays, String Theory, published in 2014, six years after his suicide; and Foster’s mammoth novel of 1996, Infinite Jest, set partly at a tennis academy and partly (this is telling) at a drug rehabilitation center.
     Have you written about tennis? I am sometimes asked. I answer no. In fact, I have assiduously avoided it. Mark Twain called golf  “a good walk spoiled.” Tennis would be a good game spoiled if I thought about it too much. There has been one exception. In 1994, I wrote "Narrow World of Sports" for The Women’s Review of Books. It is an essay that discusses 17 tennis books, most of them written or ghost-written by players or their intimates, and most of them quite awful, including Bobby Rigg’s Court Hustler (1973) and Mariana Borg’s Love Match: My Life with Bjorn (1974). Better than those were three by Billie Jean King (1974, 1982, 1988)—she has since published others, including All In (2021)—as well as one by an observer of the game, Herbert Warren Wind, who reported on tennis for The New Yorker for many years. Since I still play, I’m not going to break my rule and write much more about tennis here. I just wanted to get this down, for posterity’s sake if no other. I also wanted it to serve me as a reminder that if I do get tempted to write about tennis in my retirement, I shouldn’t.
    I should mention that my tennis-book library now includes a copy of Percy Boomer’s On Learning Golf, published in 1946. I have tried golf twice and found it wasn’t for me. Nonetheless, I picked up Boomer’s book at a used-book sale, mostly in remembrance of my parents. I did not save any of their golf books when we cleaned out their house. I have since discovered there is much wisdom imparted by Boomer that could be applied metaphorically to tennis, writing, or any other endeavor requiring the abandonment of “end-gaining,” i.e., result-seeking, while you’re in the process of achieving that result. “Do not transfer your attention from the matter of making the correct swing to the matter of where you want the ball to go,” Boomer wisely writes. His advice is really no different than “Be here now,” which is the reason why there are, in addition to Boomer's, more than a few books about Buddhism and yoga on my tennis-library shelf.

    One summer a few years ago, I took a sailing trip around Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), off the west coast of British Columbia, where our group visited some of the Haida people’s magnificent, monumental, painted-cedar totem poles on the exquisitely remote archipelago. There they were, in various states of decay. In the last few decades, however, many of the poles have gone into museum collections. (Others have gone into private collections—an entirely different phenomenon.) I will admit that at the beginning of my ten-day trip, I was emphatically in favor of what might be called the poles’ “museumification.” By mid-trip, after learning about the poles’ meanings and purposes, I modified my stance. (“Well, a few definitely should be in public institutions. The rest, okay, they can stay here.”) By the trip’s end, after meeting numerous Haida and learning directly from them about the poles, and having undergone a true education, I had made a complete reversal, thinking all of them should stay exactly put, in the beautiful, mystical cedar forests of Haida Gwaii.
    For seventeen years, while I worked as a reporter for an antiques magazine, writing about shows and auctions, it was business as usual for me to discuss in casual terms the astronomical prices people were willing to pay for items made by what Canadians call citizens of the First Nations. Once, for example, while I was covering an auction where a basket, woven in the early twentieth century by a Tlingit woman living in the Pacific Northwest, sold for $63,250, I actually asked the auctioneer if he was disappointed with that result. He was. His official pre-sale estimate had been $80,000 to $90,000. But as we agreed, collectors of this material like items fresh to the market, as close as possible to the original source, and this had come from a dealer.
        A New Jersey couple, known bargain hunters, were the basket’s buyers. No doubt, they were committed to taking care of it. Nonetheless, although it’s awkward to admit, considering what had for so long been my reportorial beat, I habitually converted prices into what more practical things the same money might have bought: a car, someone’s college tuition, years of groceries for a family of four.
        Understandably, I am more willing to acknowledge I also silently cheered whenever a public institution managed to outspend the private collectors. That’s because a museum purchase meant it had the potential of being shared by us all. So imagine how I surprised myself when, sailing around Haida Gwaii, I began to question how I felt even about museum purchases, at least where certain ethnographic material from the Pacific Northwest was concerned. In Haida Gwaii I realized I didn’t even want a museum to have what I was seeing.
       One may legitimately argue that only the Haidas’ opinions matter here. Who am I anyway to weigh in on this subject? But if we sincerely believe we are all one family, that thinking goes right out the window or, to use a more suitable metaphor, over the side of the boat with the scraps from the kitchen.
        Awakening each morning, seeing eagles in the sky and, with luck, a black bear scavenging on the shoreline, I found myself in the perfect situation for my new attitude to take form. I also had the perfect teachers. In Skedans Village, Hot Springs Island, Rose Harbour, Scudder Point, and Windy Bay, our Haida guides were the so-called watchmen who literally watch over this land of their ancestors. These otherwise regular guys, with jobs on the mainland in the cold months of the year, led us along paths carefully delineated by lines of white clam shells. We were instructed not to step beyond them into the forest, which is populated by their ancestors’ spirits.
        In each place we saw remnants of the Haidas’ summer houses and the poles that once soared above them. These communities had been abandoned starting in the mid-nineteenth century, after European diseases devastated them. We could still see their carved totems—eagle, bear, raven, killer whale, frog, beaver—but the poles facing the water were gray, weathered, like the cedar shingles one customarily sees on houses on Cape Cod. Deeper inland, where it was damp and shady, they were covered in furry green moss. What is more, while some poles were upright, others were leaning, still others had toppled. It seemed a shame; at least it did at first.
        In the late twentieth century, some poles were removed to museums on the mainland, where the idea was, they would be studied, exhibited, and preserved. Prominently, Haida artist Bill Reid orchestrated the removal of examples. Surely someone of his heritage and profession had given ample thought to such an enterprise and its consequences. Surely he could not have been wrong.
       Reid, who died in 1998, is buried on one of the islands we visited. His bronze sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe is on view at the Vancouver airport. Considering what I have learned about his life, accomplishments, philosophy, politics, and persona, it’s hard not to see him in sharp contrast him to George Gustav Heye, an investment banker whose family money came from petroleum and who founded the Museum of the American Indian in New York in 1916. Standing six-foot-three and weighing in the vicinity of three-hundred pounds, Heye smoked big cigars while driving his limousine ninety miles an hour (his chauffeur having been relegated to the passenger seat, as the story goes) in cross-country searches for objects for his collection. In the antiques trade we call that the “Hoovering” style of collecting, as in the vacuum cleaner brand.
        There’s no denying much of what Heye and others collected would otherwise have been lost. That’s why you may think, as I once did, it’s important for institutions to bring the poles inside. Otherwise, dust unto dust. Right? Well, here’s the point initially lost on me. As I learned from the watchmen, the poles’ seeming state of neglect is not neglect at all. Even if the Haida hadn’t been ravaged by the epidemics, the way I was seeing the poles was exactly as those who carved them and raised them up in great celebrations had designed them to be seen at this stage in the poles’ lives. They were meant to dissolve back into the earth, replenishing it. From the fallen ones, new trees sprout and grow straight up out of them: a complete, interdependent, ecological system. In fact, some poles are literal mortuaries, containing remains of the dead. Others are memorial poles, meant to honor people buried elsewhere, but they, too, were intended, just like life itself, to be only temporary. Seen from that new perspective, suddenly the furry green moss, especially in the sunshine, looked luminous to me, life-giving. 
      As crucial an element in the Haida ecosystem as the cedar forest is the region’s salmon. Not coincidentally, the $63,250 Tlinglit basket bought by the New Jersey couple was made to carry salmon, and seven such fish were woven into the geometric pattern ringing it. Like the Haida, the Tlingit people historically depended on the salmon for sustenance. They still do. Indeed, salmon culture was on display at an amazing lunch of local foods I enjoyed on this trip.
        They were all made by a Haida woman, Roberta Olson, whose business is Keenawaii's Kitchen. There were fresh and smoked salmon dishes of course, but also a dried version, called gilgii, and a medicinal fish oil a few drops of which Roberta offered as an addition to any dish of the meal. There were as well things like a gorgeous salad of tomatoes and blueberries—the work of an obvious artist. Only later did I find the modest Roberta on the Internet, where I discovered she and her cuisine are quite famous, so much so that, a month after we were there, she cooked lunch for Prince William and Princess Kate Middleton, serving it to them in the same space where we had eaten—her modest home.
         The royal couple’s visit was part of Britain’s ongoing historic reconciliation with the Haida Nation. There is still more work to be done. The name Queen Charlotte Islands was officially changed to Haida Gwaii in 2009, although many non-Haida persist in calling it by its former appellation.
      About four months after I returned from Haida Gwaii, I was in London and went to the British Museum. I hadn’t gotten much past the front door when, lo and behold, I saw two poles literally towering above the museum goers in what is called the Grand Court. I made a beeline for them, as if to greet old friends. I found, however, that seeing them so far removed from their original context made me sad.
        One was Haida, the other Nisga’a. “Raising poles involved tens or even hundreds of people,” the signage for the Haida example said. If I hadn’t known better, I would have taken the statement’s past tense as fact. But the truth is, new poles are being carved and raised by Haida today. I had seen a brightly painted, newly raised one at the Haida Heritage Center in Skidegate. And I had heard about another going up in Masset. One of the British Museum’s poles had come from a spot very close to that village, Kayang, in 1903. At the time, the signage said, Kayang had already been devastated by the introduced diseases and abandoned. I later looked this pole up on the museum’s website. It was acquired from Charles Frederick Newcombe (1851-1924), a “physician, botanist and ethnographer collector” who in the 1880s emigrated to Oregon, then Victoria, with his family. I also learned Newcombe started to collect Haida artifacts for multiple museums in order to “preserve” them. These include museums in the U.S. as well as Britain and Australia. The Nisga’a pole had been sold to the museum in 1933 by Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau, an early proponent of recognizing totem poles as art but also someone who believed they were a post-contact development, a theory now thoroughly debunked.
        The two poles in the Great Court have been on permanent display there since 2008. It’s undeniably true that without the museum component many people would have to travel, as I did, a great distance to see the poles—not an easy or inexpensive thing to do. Alternatively, we would have to rely on other people’s photography, and to be sure, photography does have its limits. When I got back to my London hotel room after my museum visit, I looked at the photos I had taken all over the building. Everything had come out fine, with the sole exception of my images of the poles. They simply weren’t there. Who can explain it? So odd. So uncanny. I was reminded the watchmen took special delight in telling us myths the totems on the poles represent. Some are heroes, some villains, not a few are tricksters capable of supernatural feats. I’m not one who usually subscribes to such things, but in this case, I must chalk up the disappeared photos to the spirit of the Haida.

   It started years ago, after learning that my cousin’s Maine vanity license plate, HANDAH, meant “Have a Nice Day, Asshole.” It seemed so cynical, so unfriendly—even more so when I learned that she and her husband were acquainted with others who had chosen HANDAH as their license-plate message in their respective states. After that, as I tooled around my Massachusetts town, I began to notice a creep of negative license-plate messages around me, especially ones on vehicles that had crossed the nearby New Hampshire border.
    I’m not lacking a sense of humor. I think it’s funny that at least two people got past the license-plate censors with  +SODOFF (NH) and STUGTZ (MA). I'm also willing to commiserate with those who profess themselves to be MINDLSS (NH), GROUCHY+ (NH), 2CNFUZD (NH), BITTER (NH), LAZY (NH), LOST—(NH), STNKY (NH), a TRNWRCK (NH), and all manner of mentally unstable, as in KKRZY2 (NH), NUTS2 (NH), DSTRBD (NH), and EL*LOCO (NH). I even sympathize with those who characterize themselves, respectively, as a FOOL (MA), a MOOCH (MA),  a SISSY (Bruins decal on the window, but failed to get the state), UGLY (MA), UGLY 2 (MA, motorcycle), IN-DET (NH), and HAFAST (MA). To be sure, I feel downright sorry for the persons who have chosen to drive around professing declarations like IMWRONG (NH) and UNWELL (NH).
    But I am increasingly offended by such messages as LIBRLSK (NH)—another one that got past the censors. Same goes for these in-your-face statements:  ILFINDU (NH), WETHNKNT (NH), CTHRU-U (NH) SUCKER (ME), GRRR (NH), and CUZIKAN (ME). I also see no need for SINISTR (NH), VICIOUS (NH)  or SINNER- (NH), nor for the aggressiveness of LOCNLOD (NH) and GTOFFME (NH).  Aren't there already enough of those kinds of negative feelings in the world?
    Sometimes I'm merely miffed rather than appalled by the choices people have made, for example when I see something like ROTT-N (NH), which was on the plate of a truck parked outside my dentist’s office. Was it a comment on the driver's teeth? I wondered, too, about GOUT (CT) and CHCKNPX (NH). They're diseases, for pity’s sake. Speaking of illness, how about DYZSS (NH)? Maybe it doesn't mean what it appears to mean…?
    To be sure, I have misread as negative at least two metal missives, both in Manhattan as it happened: HUKKSTER (NY) and FRAUDSTER (NY). All you readers who are savvier than I am know that hukkster must refer to hukkster.com and fraudster today means hipster not cheater. But there's no misreading of the simplest statement of all:—EVIL— (NH). I want to know. Can anyone answer me? What pleasure is there in advertising such a thing?
    A friend has suggested that a bad-girl or bad-boy image is being sought. I’ll accept that for RIFFRAFF (NH), MAD JACK (NH), ROGUE (NH), LETHAL (NH), MARAUDER (NH), and, indeed, for BADXMPL (NH) and BADGIRL (NH) itself. I’ll also offer that I’m vaguely annoyed by the polar opposite of these license plates: the all too cheerful or the morally bossy, as in GIVBAK (perhaps predictably, MA). What is more, I’ll admit that I may be taking these messages more seriously than they were ever intended to be. After all, another relative, a cousin-in-law, drives around with a license plate bearing the name of her favorite food: 2NAFSH (NH). I wish that, like her, and even like my cousin who winkingly bids bad tidings to all her fellow travelers, I could lighten up. If I did, I wouldn’t need to ponder the legitimate question of another New Hampshire-ite, Y-U-MAD (NH), and I’d leave to the gods who deal out BD KARMA (NH) the question of how to deal with the rest of it.

It's a brilliant idea, this current show at the MFA, Boston: "Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore." They led parallel lives, never having met, but having created modernists masterpieces thousands of miles away from each other that uncannily echo each other today. Here is O'Keeffe's Red Tree, Yellow Sky (1952) and Moore's working model for his Standing Figure: Knife Edge (1961) in fiberglass. (He cast it in bronze in two full-sized versions.) Throughout the multiple galleries there are juxtapositions like this one. There are also re-creations of each artist's studio, O'Keeffe's in Northern New Mexico and Moore's in Hertfordshire, about thirty miles outside London. Bob and I are sorry that we didn't visit the Moore location when we went to Seth Kennedy's studio last November. He is an antiquarian horologist who was restoring a part of the famed silver swan automaton, so the trip was wonderful in and of itself.  Of other missed opportunities: In the early 1980s I was asked by novelist Doris Grumbach if I would be interested in editing a book of  letters written by O'Keeffe to a minor character in her personal history whose name and relationship to O'Keeffe I cannot now recall. At any rate, I declined. I was very much involved with my own work, fiction at the time. That project would have caused me to veer off my path, and I know I would have regretted it. Within that year, a story was chosen for the Best American Short Stories annual and I felt I was on my way... I saw the O'Keeffe-Moore show during the press preview. I no longer write reviews of exhibitions, but I still get invited to these early looks. I suppose I could call myself an influencer -- of a dozen people or so (if that many)! I hope that suffices for the refreshments and the opportunity in this case to hear the remarks of the incredible Erica Hirshler, the MFA's John Moors Cabot curator of American painting. When she speaks, she continually looks individual members of the audience directly in the eye. Even without that device, her words, full of original, memorable phrases, would have been captivating. She is completely free of jargon...  As she pointed out, both O'Keeffe and Moore loved found objects. There were several on display in the Moore workshop mockup, e.g., a piece of driftwood that looked exactly like a miniature goat's head. I resolved to start looking more closely at the natural things around me. Since I spend more time walking than writing these days, I have the perfect opportunity.

I own an 1868 etching of this image of women watching an eclipse by Felix Braquemond. It's hanging here in my study. I bought it at auction at Skinner, intending it to be the cover of Shadow Bands (1988), my short-story collection, but Raymond Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, the book's publishers, didn't think much of it. Instead, I used an image of a painting by Alice Neel that didn't translate very well from color to black-and-white. Oh, well. I am posting (publishing?) "The Eclipse" now, all these years later, on the occasion of the solar eclipse partially seen here in Andover on April 8. The light became strange, greenish-brownish-yellow, but the day didn't become dark. It was over quickly. I didn't use special glasses to see it. I just kept gardening. I suppose I feel about eclipse-watching the way I feel about bird-watching: it's all  too far away. And yet I used eclipse metaphor in the title story of my long-ago collection... and shadow bands is itself a specialized eclipse term... Eclipses must have meant something to me back then. I'll have to reread the story...

p.s. I met Scott Wheeler, the composer, at a party when my book was either nearing publication or was already out. When I told him about the title and its meaning, he was intrigued, and a few days later he asked me if I would mind if he used the same for the title of his forthcoming CD. Of course, I didn't.  And so in addition to mine, there is also his Shadow Bands (1990) for violin, viola, and cello.

Rebecca Hall is brilliant in this film that depicts the tragedy of Christine Chubbuck, the local TV newscaster in Florida who commits suicide on air in 1974 just before her thirtieth birthday.  I can't really tell you why but the hand-puppet motif--showing Christine at a volunteer job putting on a show for children at a hospital and then, perhaps (we can't tell from the point of view), one for herself alone--is particularly poignant. Michael C. Hall is perfect as the airhead anchor who is her undeserving crush as are Tracy Letts, her bullying boss, and J. Smith-Cameron, her ditsy mother. Hall's husband, Morgan Spector, appears briefly as the gynecologist who gives her bad news about her chances of having children of her own.

We decided a couple of weeks ago to celebrate Bob's 72nd birthday by going to see a play in Boston. Any play. We looked at what was available and chose one. Thank God we made the random choice that we did. Otherwise we would have missed Alice Childress's brilliant Trouble in Mind, presented by the Lyric Stage.

We went in cold, not knowing a thing about it, but the name Alice Childress (1912-1994) was familiar to me from the  Printed and Manuscript African Americana sales at Swann that I wrote about for many years. At some point, I had come across her and some rare edition of one of her novels, probably ​A Hero Aint Nothin' But a Sandwich. But that's as far as my knowledge went. I didn't even know that the play's title was taken from that of a famous blues song. In any case, into Boston we drove on a snowy afternoon.

The play's premise is that its African American cast was going to have to perform as stereotypes in yet another tiresome, third-rate production. Taking on the roles of characters named "Petunia" and "Ruby," the women were going to have to do the usual shouting of things like "Lawd have mercy!" and one of men was going to have to do such a loathsome thing as whittle a stick. And in the beginning scenes, although they made hilarious fun of the whole enterprise, they were, as always, willing to comply because they wanted to be actors in anything and they needed the money.

As the play proceeds, however, "Ruby," a.k.a. Wiletta, finds she has had enough of it. The play-within-the-play's plot requires her to deliver her son, who has committed the terrible crime of voting, into the hands of the local sheriff for his own, supposed safety. She argues with the director, a white man named Al Manners, asserting that a mother would never give up her son like that. She would urge him to escape. She refuses to practice the scene and insists that it be changed. The other cast members, because they really do need their jobs, don't support her. She is a lone voice, which delivers an amazing monologue, asking Al Manners over and over if he would give his own son up to a sheriff and, it is understood, certain death. Manners then delivers his own monologue, culminating in the admission that he would never equate his white son with any son of a black woman.

The play had a run Off Broadway in 1955, but never made it to Broadway itself, until 2021, because Childress refused to rewrite it to be more acceptable to white audiences. She was just like her own character, Wileta, in that -- refusing to compromise and accepting the consequences.

Addendum: To wit: “Once Upon a Time, Again,” a review of James by Percival Everett (a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's point of view)  in The Economist, March 16, 2024, 72-73: “Jim decides to indulge them anyway—because ‘it always pays to give white folks what they want.’”  “In Mr. Everett’s telling, Jim’s slave dialect is a put-on. He drops it around other slaves, but reverts to [it] when a white person appears. ‘White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them.’”  The book is on my to-read list.  -- J.S.  April 30, 2024.