Tonight

I can certainly understand why some people might not like this evening. But years ago I made my peace with Halloween, because it's likely the most neighborly day of the year in many a New York City apartment building.  We see all the neighbor kids, talk to their parents, and people generally appreciate the fact that we're actually home to hand out treats instead of just leaving a bag by the door.  Halloween in the building just doesn't have a creepy feeling.  But we generally stay off the streets when the rowdier party-ers emerge.  

When C.Z. was younger, our policy was pretty much to go around in our building only (though we did try the one next door one year, and a neighborhood parade another), and to wear no creepy costumes.  C.Z. preferred dressing up as famous women anyway, so she was happy enough with that.  And after one candy binge year, I think she even got the point about sugar moderation.

  

 Queen Elizabeth

 Marie Antoinette

C.Z. hasn't been interested in trick-or-treating for some time now, but she still likes seeing all the little kids' costumes, so she answers the door.  We really hadn't given this evening a thought until today, when I picked up a pumpkin at the farmers' market, and then C.Z. decided that sugar cookies would be much nicer than candy, so she made some.  She cut them into pumpkin shapes, and they were a big hit!  We had some nice neighbor visits and saw some fun costumes, but our time is just about up.  But we'll be in the kitchen for a while yet.  It's NYC marathon weekend, and we're making spaghetti sauce for carbo-loading. 

In honor of the extra-early marathon date this year, we improvised the following decor for our hallway.  (Bob had left his running gloves on the counter, all four of them.)  Speaking of building hallways, I once had a rather scary dream in which I had moved back to Georgia, went to the front door of my house in the middle of the night because I heard a noise, and as the frightening dream music escalated, I realized that there was no longer any reassuring hallway outside my front door, only trees!  Of course I'm not really that citified, but it was a funny dream nevertheless.  

Well, whether you celebrate the day or not, have a good weekend, and enjoy your fall days and winter squash!

All Kinds of Learning Links

I've been revisiting Eide Neurolearning Blog lately.  I used to read it a few years ago, but quit because I just needed to concentrate more on day to day homeschooling. Besides, reading about gifted education sometimes gets my mind working along paths that aren't helpful for me or my family. And sometimes I also debate the cause and effect with MRIs.

But that said, I hadn't visited the site for a long time, and when I looked I saw that meanwhile the Eides had added a lot of entries on creativity and the brain.  I've put some of them (or a lot of them) over in my shared items, on the right.  I'm a big fan of "creative late-bloomer makes good" stories, so you'll find lots of those.  And one nice thing about the Eides' blog entries is that you can read the short, summary version in just a couple of minutes, and then decide how interested you are in following the links they give showing more information, some of which is quite clinical.  

But don't take my word for it--go have a look yourself. Happy reading!

Morandi, modern traditionalist

Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1954

Oil on canvas; 10 1/4  27 1/2 in. Mart, (26 x 70 cm) 

Museo d"arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Collection of Augusto and Francesca Giovanarti, Archivio fotograpfico Mart. Copyright Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE Rome

Giorgio Morandi is a painter's painter.  Well, actually most of the printmakers claim him, too.  The easy answer to Who is Giorgio Morandi? is that he is the foremost master of modern etching in the world. The real answer is more complex.  He isn't known for his political statements or radical subject matter.  He lived in the same family studio in Bologna all his life, rarely left Italy, and painted the same set of ordinary objects--vases, pitchers, boxes, shells, and other ordinary objects.  In fact, you can see some of the very same objects in paintings ranging from the 1910s to the 1960s.  Some people thought of him as a sort of saint or monk.  But he wasn't a total isolate.  He was in touch with the modernist painting movements of his time, and his influences range from Piero della Francesca to Cezanne and Giorgio di Chirico.  He simply focused on the internal aspects of painting, limiting his narrative, his subject matter, even his palette, to focus on teasing the composition, paint treatment, and the edges of his paintings.  His most famous quote is, "Nothing is more abstract than reality."  

The current exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum is the first comprehensive Morandi show in the United States.  

At home in Manhattan

A strip of darker cinnamon, laid in days of unearned spaciousness

Certainly everyone comes online so that they can read poetry about Manhattan while sipping their morning coffee, right?  It's right up there with craft projects, I'm sure.  Well, anyway, Bob has been reading a a book of poems by Adam Kirsch, called Invasions.  Each night he shows me some of the ones he thinks I will particularly appreciate.  And I appreciate them.  

New York is rich in cultural references.  Artists paint and photograph its streets and people, musicians write music that suggests its energy, essayists analyze and celebrate it, and now there's poetry that intimately describes my apartment (or ones like it) or even the median strip that runs down Broadway along the Upper West Side.  

New Yorkers have an odd concept of public and private space, often commandeering blatantly shared space for their own childhood or otherwise intimate memories.  No wonder E.L. Konigsberg wrote a book about children living in the Metropolitan Museum.  Many New Yorkers, especially children, regard Manhattan as their own personal property.  It's  partly because they have so little private space of their own.

So, at risk of being entirely too esoteric for anyone's good, here is a poem that felt like home to me, because I see it as being about my own apartment, and perhaps about my own life, or at any rate about my own tiny portion of Manhattan:

A narrow strip of darker cinnamon

Traces a border on the parquet floor:

One of the insignificant, uncommon

Details from that vague era called prewar

In Douglas Elliman's sleek, provoking slang, 

For which the postwar-prosperous compete;

The sort of luxury that draws a pang

From the ultramodern complex down the street.

Not until later do they notice how 

The border runs wrong-angled in the hall

And vanishes, the careful pattern now

Sectioned to incoherence by the wall

That carved the unit from the one next door.

The expectation of unbroken lines

And unearned spaciousness is gone; no more

The ordinary life of large design.

I'm sitting in a former maid's room, by the way.  Can you imagine, a live-in maid?  Most of our dining room, complete with another set of windows, was ingested by the apartment next door, sometime during the mysterious past.  Once the ordinary Manhattanite life was indeed of larger design.  It may have even felt slow-paced and connected.  As it is, I'm carving out my own sense of time and approximating it in many ways to the old, unbroken lines.  These poems acknowledge many New Yorkers' struggles to live a more coherent life.  

Even the cover of this book has intimate associations for me.  Once, when C.Z. was about six, our family was taking a walk from the East Side to the West, when we came upon the Soldiers and Sailors monument in the west 80s. The monument reminds me of one of those plastic decorations that used to grace the tops of wedding cakes.  It's a disproportionately thin, marble rotunda along the Hudson River, flanked by huge, old-fashioned cannon--from what war, I'm not sure--pointing out over the river.  

We'd been learning about history in a hit-the-highlights kind of way, as eager new homeschoolers will do, so we'd touched upon the Civil War and then taken a tour of Revolutionary War fortifications in Central Park in perhaps too quick succession.  In a similarly didactic mood, Bob pointed across the Hudson river and asked C.Z., "Do you know what's over there?"

C.Z. shook her head.

"That's New Jersey."

C.Z. looked across the river, glanced at the row of cannon, and then knitted her brows at us and screeched, "We're at war with New Jersey?!"

It wasn't until I examined the cover of this book, however, and recognized in the background the outline of the Upper West Side with its wedding cake monument, that I realized New Jersey is returning fire.

Just in case you were wondering...

I did a bit of sleuthing, and the Empire State Building set below can be yours for a mere $7500. Okay, so I don't think it's going on our Christmas list, but the artist's website is fun and has a lot more details of this and other Sean Kenney LEGO creations.  (See, I told you I'd be posting noteworthy artists from time to time!)

The Chrysler Building is also available.

But frankly, I'd settle for this adorable walk-up.  It's much more affordable than the real thing (or the Empire State Building), and it probably has about as many square feet. And I could renovate it myself!

Enjoy your homebuilding dreams today, however humble they may be.  I think C.Z. and I are going to go pull out the plastic bricks soon...

Back home and ready to go...I think

Well, now, that was a whirlwind couple of weeks--a visit from friends to NYC, a very short jaunt to the other side of the country, and then, almost so predictably that I could count one, two, three as we got off the plane, I went down with a stomach virus.  But it gave me time to think, and now I'm ready for daily life again.

Main receiving room, Ellis Island

We enjoyed being tour guides with our friends A & a (a mother and daughter who lived next door to us eleven years ago in Georgia).  They inspired us to go to some New York spots we hadn't seen in a very long time, like the top of the Empire State Building--or ever, like Ellis Island!  We packed an amazing amount of NYC into five days.  

A very special-order Lego set in the Empire State Building gift shop.  I confess that I still look at sets like this with the eyes of a kid!  

But I think that for all of us, our favorite part of the five days was Sunday afternoon, when we took some time off and C.Z. went scootering in the park with her first best friend.  We were comfortable enough together before, but I think that's when we fully reconnected. You never know what's going to happen when you meet best friends from the past after a long absence. For one thing, at a head taller than me, little "a" is certainly little no longer!  But if anything, I think I appreciate these friends even more than I did when we were next door neighbors.  I appreciate that A makes no pretensions and lives a simple life, but is quietly cheerful and wise.  I appreciate that a is still very much herself, even though both a and C.Z. will be fourteen soon. It was a delight to me to observe certain mannerisms in this teenager that I recognized from age two! Perhaps it's harder to see in one's own child, but I'm sure C.Z.'s two-year-old personality was already established in certain ways as well.  Isn't it wonderful how, in our basic personalities, we are what we are, and we can rest in God's having made us that way?

Then there was that quick little business trip during which we followed Bob to the west coast. Three days, four plane flights, a nice dinner with a friend, a whole lot of appointments, and enough coffee to keep us going despite confused sleep schedules and flight delays.  But still, there was time enough to see that there's something absolutely stunning about the West, even from a plane window.  I do think that my vision of Heaven must take something from the idea of high mountains at sunset, even though I know that Heaven isn't so much a place as it is the presence of God.  But it's a place, too, because God promises us a new Heavens and a new Earth.  Lots of people I know think that the new Jerusalem is New York, but I'll leave that one alone for now.

We came home to find fall in full bloom, as it were.  I got the refrigerator nicely filled with CSA veggies, farmers' market fare, and Fresh Direct, and then...promptly lost my appetite because of a virus and slept for two days.  I woke up yesterday morning after the first nap of the day to notice that the ceramic gourd bowl that A had given me looked quite fetching on my radiator with winter squash inside it and "our" fire-tipped maple tree in the background.  So I reached for my camera and took some photos of it.  

Then after my third or fourth nap of the day, between desultory bouts of reading, I woke to find sunset light reflected on my bookshelves and cabinets.  Now, if there's anything I'm attached to in my physical surroundings, it's these lovely cabinets that a friend of a friend built when we first moved in.  They glow warmly in the sun, and they house quite a number of beloved books.  So I reached for the camera and took a couple more photos.  

My glasses, which I usually wear only at night, aren't strong enough, so most of the photos were out of focus.  But I did get enough reasonably focused ones to get some of the feeling of dreaminess from yesterday, between naps and reading bits of Henri Nouwen or Owen Barfield.  There's something about sleeping, and about being sick, that causes one to regain perspective, so I spent a lot of time thinking and feeling like a weaned child with its mother, which is not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  Today I'm ready to go again...I think.

This is usually Bob's nap chair, but he generously shared it with me this weekend while I slept.  I hope not to spend quite so much time there today.

Away for a bit

John Singer Sargent, Italian Girl with a Fan, 1882.

Cincinnati Art Museum, The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial

Just a note to say I'll be more or less offline for a week or two.  We have some beloved friends from the past coming to visit today, and we'll be showing them the city.  After that, we'll be taking a quick trip out of town for a few days.  I may post, or I may not.  I may just read other people's blogs, since that's easier than posting myself.  But I haven't disappeared entirely.

What's that Sargent painting doing up there?  Well, it's part of a teeny, tiny daybook.  

I woke up at about 6:00 this morning to make Bob's breakfast.  When I went into the living room, it was cold because all the windows were open (C.Z. had been creating a patio on the radiator last night) and the overnight low was 46.  It was still dark, with the orange street lights casting mullion shadows on the closed curtains.  As I opened the curtains and leaned across the radiator to close the windows, I saw a beautiful lapis sky.  A few lamps were on in apartments here and there, and an airplane with its pinpoint headlight was arching into the sky seconds after takeoff.  The moments between nighttime and morning are among my favorite moments of the day.

I made toast and coffee, sat down with Bob to eat, and then took a second cup over to my favorite spot on the sofa to read John.  I was wearing my long cotton April Cornell nightgown, and had the chenille throw blanket over my shoulders as a shawl.  As I wrote in my journal, I became aware of these things, and that the only sounds I heard were the faint chirping of a House Sparrow and a garbage truck making its rounds, blocks away.  (That last detail is more Realism than Romanticism.)  

The nightgown and shawl got me to thinking about Sargent's Venetian paintings of young women in white dresses and shawls, standing in the shadows of old buildings.  My hair is the right color, but I'm sure I don't look that young or slender, especially at 6:00 a.m. No matter!  This seemed as good a time as any to think about Sargent, who is a master portraitist and long one of my favorite painters.  He hits the cusp between Romanticism and Realism, even though he painted well into the 20th century.  It irked him late in life, I think, that people admired him mainly for being able to make new money look like old, and any middling woman to look elegant.  But any artist who has tried to paint alla prima (spontaneously) knows how extremely talented he was.  So, here's to Sargent, dark ultramarine skies before dawn, chenille blankets, and living la dolce vita, which is not as spontaneous at it appears but is enjoyable nonetheless, for the next couple of weeks!

Chesterton on Alexander Pope and politics

Alexander Pope (from Wikipedia Commons)

I have finished Chesterton's slim volume Twelves Types for a couple of weeks now, but one particular essay keeps coming back to me in relation to politics.  

No, I am not going to start posting on the Presidential election.  I vote, and I have definite opinions, and I would even take action if I thought it appropriate (more likely on a local level), but there is a whole lot of political commentary out there in the blogosphere, and I don't think it will be enhanced by my contributions.  Besides which, the whole subject just makes me tired. 

But I do think that Chesterton adds something to political discourse which we would all do well to remember.  And it is that politics that takes no consideration of the other side's virtues is a very poor kind of politics.  

"In one art which peculiarly belongs to civilization, [Pope] was supreme--the great and civilized art of satire.  And in this we have fallen away utterly..."

(Pope is the man, by the way, who invented the phrase "Damning with faint praise.")

"It is too much the custom of politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since the beginning of the world.  This kind of invective may often have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions.  But there is one man among all those millions whom it does not impress...that is the man against whom it is directed...He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man.  But behind all this he has the real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul: behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of revenge.  It is to these that satire should reach if it is to touch the man at whom it is aimed.  And to reach these it must pass and salute a whole army of virtues."

Notice that he says nothing so insipid as "Can't we all just get along?"  We should do everything we can to discern which actions are most likely to produce the virtuous ends we desire, and debate and vote accordingly.  But there is a patience, a magnanimity, Chesterton says, even to satire.  There's no point pretending that the other side has no good motives at all, however mistaken we may think their means, or even their worldview.  That's called setting up a straw man, and it's not even genuinely witty.  Chesterton adds:

"In current political materialism there is everywhere the assumption that, without understanding anything of his case or his merits, we can benefit a man practically. Without understanding his case and his merits, we cannot even hurt him."

Just something to think about over the next month, and during the aftermath.  

An excellent article on education

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz is from the summer issue of The American Scholar, and although I've already seen it quoted several places, most of the citations emphasize the first paragraph, in which the Ivy-League-educated author realizes that he can't hold a conversation with his plumber.  But the really meaty content is weighted towards the end of the article.  I positively beg you, if you are interested in education, to print the entire article out and go read it in a quiet corner somewhere. It's the best explanation I've ever seen of why Ivy League universities can't offer a deep education.  While I don't share an interest in the particular examples of genuine thought that Deresiewicz gives, I absolutely agree with his description of how a curious mind should work and what it should feel like to think. He links education with genuine friendship, with solitude and with leisure, and explains in realistic and pragmatic detail just how Ivy League students are hobbled in pursuit of these qualities.  

Is the article accurate?  Let's hope some of the characteristics that Deresiewicz is describing are simply his own reaction to his education.  I don't know first hand, as I went to a state school.  But having lived in Manhattan for the past ten years, I can see how he got the idea, and think that, in a general way, it's accurate.  It's not that self-satisfied people go to Ivy-League schools.  Most of the Ivy-Leaguers with whom I am acquainted are kind, socially conscientious, and of course, incredibly smart.  It's more that the preparation that leads to the Ivies, the college years themselves, and the life expected of a graduate, all emphasize competition and achievement, and competition and achievement simply aren't conducive to thought.

Oh, and by the way, I have some links over to the right in the form of shared items and Delicious bookmarks.  While my posts are often more daily fare, I try to make sure most of the bookmarks are articles that interest me more because they're thought provoking.  Often they are about education or some other cultural issue. So, if you like that kind of thing, check them out.  I just thought I'd mention it because I can't get the Delicious gadget with tags to load, so you can't see what the topics are unless you click on the link.

Notes on the day

Fall weather arrived in earnest today, with a constant coldish wind. Everything felt different!

The first thing I heard as I sat down next to the open window with my journal this morning was a man singing "O Holy Night" in an operatic voice.  I have no idea whether he was in another apartment or on the street, because I didn't hear him for long.  Shortly afterwards, a fire truck with an intermittent siren passed by (they don't blare continuously at seven a.m.), and I didn't hear him after that.  I actually needed the chenille blanket over my feet.

This is the corner where I sit and journal each morning.

More lights were on in the windows of the other buildings, even though it was getting light, because many people are now getting up while it's still dark.  Whenever I get up earlier than usual, say 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., I'm surprised to see lights on that I never see on at any other time.  I figure these people just have really unusual work schedules.  The apartment in the building behind us is one of these, and one of its windows has been broken for a month.  I wonder why the landlord added a penthouse apartment to this building last year, but won't fix the window. And what does this person do that requires them to get up so early and stay out all day and night so that the curtains are never open?  It bothers me.

Once Bob left for work, C.Z. and I ran in the park, and she kicked up her heels so much that she almost beat her own personal record.  The dogs in the park all looked extremely happy, too.  

Birds were making an unusual lot of noise while we ran.  Perhaps it was the hawk we heard overhead as we entered park, but I think it's more likely they were coming in with the fall wind.  At an overlook I heard a high call from a rush of small birds.  I hoped very much that they were kinglets (we usually get Golden-crowned Kinglets for a couple of days in October).  On another pass by the overlook, I saw a small bird that I didn't recognize (I actually stopped running for a few seconds and stared after it, which could partly explain why my running times are so slow lately).  I lost it before I got a good look, and decided to that we should definitely go out later in the day.  We had seen newly-arrived White-throated Sparrows on Tuesday.  Those are winter residents, those the birds that sing, "Oh, say, Canada, Canada!"

We did schoolwork and our other tasks for the day and went out again for birds as soon as we could. By now, low gray clouds were blowing across the sun, but they were moving so fast that they came and went.  The tops of the trees tossed in the wind.  We saw one genuinely fallish-looking branch with yellow and orange leaves, but everything else was still deep summer green. I figured this was going to be either a good day for birds, or a bust, but nothing like the past few weeks.  

And it was a good day!  Right away, at the Drip, we saw three Blue Jays chasing each other out of the pool, a Flicker come to drink, a Phoebe wagging its tail on the fence, and a Redstart (or a Yellowstart as we call them) fanning its tail in the bush.  Later on, up in the woods, we saw the White-throats again, a Wood Thrush, a Swainson's Thrush, Titmice, and when we looked back on the trail, a lovely Black-throated Blue Warbler.  We distinctly heard a Chickadee.  And on the way home, I spotted the bird I had so wanted to see ever since last October--a tiny kinglet!  This one was a Ruby-crowned, not a Golden-crowned, but we stopped to watch it gleaning insects with its tiny beak from the branches of a bush and then tree for a long time, all by itself.  I do think kinglets may be my very favorite birds.  And those thrushes somehow remind me of fall in the same way that winter squashes do.  They're sturdy and plain, but satisfying to see.  And they sing well, too.  (There the analogy falls apart.)

A Ruby-Crowned Kinglet (image from Wikipedia Commons)

When we got home, we were cold from being outside for the first time since last May.  I took a cue from Susan's blog and made myself a first cup of Raspberry tea for the season.  C.Z. made hot chocolate, and we poured them both in her tea cups from Boston.  We sat down to do our last bit of schoolwork, a Latin translation from Wheelock's.  "Hot chocolate and Latin," she mused. "I feel like French royalty!  Or maybe more like the Pauper in The Prince and the Pauper."  I never would have guessed, back when I was having to drag her through Latina Christiana last spring, that she would think translation was fun.  But when she finished her short paragraph, she looked up and asked, "Are there any more of these?"  I think Wheelock's is a much more grown up book, and I wish that I hadn't been too intimidated to try it last year.  But who knows?  Sometimes fit and timing in learning are a bit of a mystery.

C.Z. was so inspired by the weather that she picked up her fiddle and spontaneously produced a very warm, smoky rendition of "Beech Spring."  What's fallish about this?  I don't know, but it reminds me of log cabins and Pa's fiddle, so perhaps she thought so, too.  Now she's playing Vaughn Williams and whistling to it in harmony.  

And finally, we got another dramatic cloud and sun effect with our view again.  I like this one even better, and it accurately reflects the blue-gray, watercolor raggedness of the clouds today. 

Whether it's fall yet or not where you are, I hope you had a pleasant day of it. Time to go cook dinner!