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.