Ending - and beginning again - with the alphabet



Time is stretching its paws, and trying to decide if it's motivated enough to get up off that couch... No, wait, that's me.

Motivation is my middle name. Currently, my first name is Lacking...

The opening of my Bestiary show, Where Are We Going? was a lot of fun, with kids and crayons and friends and finger food. I was grateful to Neal and Caroline, and everyone who showed up, dropping my jaw when some friends I'd believed to be in Honduras (where they live) walked through the door. I even sold a painting or two. Or a few more.

Already, I am nostalgic for the structure of the alphabet. Every day another letter, another agonizing decision (“Wombat? Warthog? Weasel? Wolverine?”), finishing the Vervet monkey painting the night before the opening. And the pressure of painting on the walls, getting it right.

I really had a good time, in spite of the stress.

I am trying to get back to writing, but I am also planning to keep up the alphabet. The fox sold, to a friend who bought it for someone undergoing Folfox chemotherapy – a wonderful thing to do, giving a totem gift.

Which leaves the doors open for another F. Fox again? So clever, those foxy eyes...

       *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *    

What language have you always wanted to learn? There are a lot of languages we think we should learn, or we like the idea of, but we won't actually take the effort of making it happen.

For a lot of people, that language is French.

For me, it's always been Spanish.

The whole post-cancer-reevaluating-priorities stage has made me scratch my head about a lot of these declared desires: Do I want another Master's? Do I want to be a painter? Do I want to write young adult fiction, or write something that makes no sense at all but does something else entirely?

The answers are in flux, but it turns out that I have nothing, motivationally speaking, against learning Spanish, aside from not knowing how to go about it.

For my accidental learning of French, I went to live on a farm in Normandy with a bunch of goats, a cat, and some chickens. None of them spoke French, so I bought myself a copy of Le Petit Prince, read it, annotated it, read it several more times. Then I met my husband in Berkeley, and he finally taught me French...

So, conflating the initial act with the real cause of the end result that I now speak French, I decided I would get myself some books in Spanish. Surely, the fluency came from that first book, right?

My friends Camille Collins Lovell and Oscar Estrada gave me reading recommendations, and I have now ordered Eva Luna in Spanish (I read it in English years ago, so it will be a different experience), and La noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral, by Elena Poniatowska.

And, because I love Raúl Juliá (wasn't he great as Gomez Adams?), and this is completely related to my motivation to learn Spanish even though the movie was in English, I also ordered El beso de la mujer araña (The Kiss of the Spider Woman), by Manuel Puig.



Also trying to learn Old English, from Beowulf, and An Introduction to Old English, by Richard Hogg, was very kindly posted in pdf form online. I looked him up, just to send an email of thanks. Alas, he can afford to be generous, cause he's dead.

Posthumous thanks, anyway.

Comments

Post a Comment

Subscribe

* indicates required

Popular posts from this blog

What comes next?

Image
Surgery was a month ago. Since then I have been sleeping, writing, painting (a little) and playing with my children. Each child alone is a pleasure, although the two together are baking soda and vinegar. I'm not saying which is which. Finally, Laurent took smallest monkey to France, where smallest monkey will spend a whole month alone with his grandparents, because we all needed a break, including Emile. He might even start maternelle,  preschool, there, for a short while. Everyone gets a break, but I miss him like crazy. Starting tomorrow, I will be going to Boston every day for radiation - that's three hours round trip for 15 minutes of being turned into the Hulk. I'm doing it because they will also be giving me more chemo, and I apparently love chemo that much... Every day is hard. It's a mixture of crabby because I might die within the next five years, and blissed out because life is so beautiful, and crying when I hug my family. It's extrem
Read more

Women in abstraction: a century and a half of female artists at the Centre Pompidou

Image
The Women in Abstraction show at the Centre Pompidou was arbitrary, condescending, and totally worthwhile. I mean, Elle font d'Abstraction is just short of “Look! A woman can make a painting! How quaint!”  Still, go. You won't regret it.  They more than make up for any condescension... And if they don't, we're clearly hungry for this exhibit. I counted two women in attendance for every man – yes, really, I counted.   “The utopian ideals of pure abstraction have allowed women artists some kind of entree into art, since a truly universalist art practice would be genderfree... but it was a myth.” - Mira Schor, 2009, from “Some Notes on Women and Abstraction” On a personal note, I hadn't been expecting to have a night alone in Paris. I certainly hadn't expected to have a good time. I'd always associated Paris with exhausting in laws, arguments, and trying to keep up with fast paced conversations in a new language. But my flight out of Charles De Gaulle was sched
Read more

NaNoWriMo and Escapist Literature

Image
My name is Julia, and I am addicted to escapist literature. I'll read far into the night, even through the night, to get to the end of a story. Even a cluster of not exceptional YA fantasy stories, like the ones I've recently brought home from the library. (Librarian: "You know those are from the young adult section?" Me: Blank look.) Or maybe the stories are good, and I've just had a temporary raising of the bar for books in general, from having finished Abigail Thomas' memoir, Three Dog Life . Which is one of those books full of truth written beautifully, that often made me laugh, about loss of what we know, and loving what takes its place. Profound, in other words. Most of what I read isn't profound. My mother, who worked in a bookstore for part of my childhood, brought home great boxes of books without their covers. Some of my all time favorite books, of which I know every illustration, I wouldn't recognize on your coffee table at a
Read more