best years

Prompt 38 in Upper Rubber Boot's 100 Untimed Books photo challenge is best years.



I'm indulging in irony here, as Niki and Harry's marriage did not last, though Harry would later remember their years together as "fabulous" and Niki would write about becoming close friends with Harry's second wife and sharing many secrets with her. A woman who spent her life with a paintbrush in one hand and a 22-calibre rifle in the other, Niki de Saint Phalle survived abuse and multiple suicide attempts to create compelling works of art.

Harry and Me is a book that zigs and zags from memories of delight to memories of frustration to memories of contentment. There's Niki being so distraught at the death of a parakeet that she slashes "a very good painting"; she says that Harry then became "furious with me and he made me promise to never ever take my grief out on my work like that again." Then, a few pages later, there's a clash of styles in Madrid:

Harry was very careful and meticulous with his proper use of the Spanish language. I on the other hand, wanted only to communicate. I did not care about grammar (or mistakes in general) and my Spanish annoyed him no end. Because of Harry's perpetual correction, which grated my nerves, I stupidly gave up speaking it although I could understand it well enough.

But there was also happiness:

One of Harry's and my great pleasures during our several trips to Spain was to eat in tapas bars instead of regular restaurants. We ate at tapas bars in Cordoba when we went to visit the mosque there, and I think also in Madrid. These tapas bars served a huge variety of spicy, heavy and delicious nibbles to be eaten while sipping the strong red Spanish wine. There were tapa of all kinds: squid tapa, sausage tapa, chicken and olive tapa, and shellfish tapa, etc. Harry and I would sit at the bars for long hours and just point to the things that we wanted to eat.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/120769.html.

haplessness, consumption, and brevity

The Cubs are inflicting the usual dose of October heartache/heartburn, so I'm going to pickle carrots instead. (There's also work to get through, but staying away from monitors for the next few innings seems like a good idea.)

There seems to be no escaping Thoreau today, albeit in texts that address the mythologizing of him. In Mark Caldwell's The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862-1954, his death from tuberculosis is presented as an example of a 19th-century tendency to cast such deaths as gentle, pure goings-into-the-good-night -- an erasure of what one could argue were the victims' true personalities (vigorous, worldly, earthy) when they were healthy. And Dawn Potter relays Katherine Schulz's observations about Thoreau, including thought-provoking comparisons of Walden to Prospect Park (neither being all that off the grid) and Thoreau to Laura Ingalls Wilder (fictional vs. real isolation).

(An extra layer to this, which I only just remembered: I'm attending a wedding later this year in Prospect Park... and the groom and the officiant and I participated together in a mock trial about thirty years ago where I was drafted to portray Thoreau. "But I haven't read any Thoreau." I forget how our classmates persuaded me that a quick trip to the library would give me enough to improvise with, but I vaguely recall them managing to make contrarian-ness sound like a compliment, and they later reassured me when my Thoreau turned out to be a terrible witness on behalf of Socrates [who was once again sentenced to death], because what I'd said as him was in character.)

Signal boost: 7x20 is seeking tweet-sized pieces by women and writers of color. Non-paying market.

On a related note, I'm the featured poet at 7x20 this week. So far:

Code Name Taurus...
Persian calligraphy

*peeks at scoreboard* FFS, Cubs. OK, I'm off to do some violence to root vegetables.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/395158.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.