Epilogue Frontispiece Finished.

L'épilogue de Dangerose
Dangerose as Carpacci's Lion of St. Mark's Venice

Vraiment, Felix?

A diptych with Ferret, below.

Ti Voglio Bene, Ferret

Riffing, of course, on Leonardo's Lady with Ermine.

Felix, as Dante, Encounters Dangerose, as Beatrice...

Accompanied by Two Spectres

Riffing on a kitsch painting available everywhere in Florence on postcards.

Backstage Maurice.

Monofonous_Collections09_09
Originally uploaded by Monofonus Press

Maurice Brie performing "Les Feuilles Mortes."

Monofonous_Collections09_15
Originally uploaded by Monofonus Press

Maurice Brie performing "Les Feuilles Mortes."

Monofonous_Collections09_16
Originally uploaded by Monofonus Press

Backstage Maurice.

Monofonous_Collections09_36
Originally uploaded by Monofonus Press

Backstage photos from my performance as Maurice Brie at "The Collections" premiere, June 27, 2009. Photo: Anna Krachey for Monofonus Press

Dangerose's new heraldry: Mélusine with Dog and Sphinx Salient

L'art pour l'art, l'amour fou. (Art for art's sake, crazy love.}

Three-day weekend = more drawing.

Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Well, really, it was the stroke of noon. And I wasn't eating a croissant and toting a take-out coffee.

But I do have something new and sparkly that comes in the turquoise box in the tiny turquoise shopping bag that puts a lilt in one's step for days. Without a wedding to pay for next month, I figured someone owed me a diamond -- and it turns out it's me! I also wanted to celebrate no medical tests until October, and finishing the book, and nearly finishing the epilogue drawing series -- later this week, probably. And I bought myself a white dress. But this one's more like a slip, and from the 1920's, with white embroidery. Now that every day is over 100 degrees here I need something white and light and airy -- the prototypical summer dress -- to wear with ankle-tied espadrilles and a tan. But I think I can wear it in winter, too, over a turtleneck and with black ribbed stockings and short boots -- rockin' that turn-of-the-century Death in Venice look. In any case, it's one of those prototypical dresses that's timeless and like something I draw.

And I wore a hibiscus flower in my hair while I shopped. Happy day. (Smile) Sometimes I do take good care of me.

The Spoils of Love

Hmmm. Perhaps Hermès should consider this as a scarf design.

Although not figurative, still a three hour drawing.

One year later: Dangerose as Mrs. Siddons

Revisiting two drawings from a year ago...

The Babysitter


The Duties of a Good Mistress

Another student suicide.

Really, it is simply unbelievable.

Does it seem I must be making all this death up? I keep thinking I'll awaken from a nightmare.

+ + + + + + +

I've continued to keep riding the wave of an artistic high. I'm back to drawing, after taking a couple of nights off around last week's performance. Now I'm back to it. I think there are three or four more drawings left, and then this series is finished.

And I've archived about thirty pieces on Somnambulit, my new writing archive, some dating back to 1972. I need to prowl through my archives again, but I think nearly everything I wanted to share is now posted.

I haven't been sleeping much. It must be the above hundred degree temperatures. But I have been in a kind of artistic tizzy since Bob's death. And my own health issues have definitely added a sense of urgency to the mix. Pina Bausch's death can't help but have the same effect on me. I probably won't sleep much for the next couple of months. If the work is going well, of course I want to keep working. The artistic blocks, the silences, always arrive on their own, and with them, a period of sleep and restfulness.

I, for one, need some movie eye candy tonight.

Death! Death! Too much death!

And I'm listening to new Charles Aznavour downloads. That helps, too.

PINA BAUSCH IS DEAD.

I am beyond words.

She was my art god.

Video from Saturday! Merci beaucoup, Ali!

Afterglowing

from last night's performance. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't come out of retirement. Although it makes me a nervous wreck leading up to it, I love doing it so much in the moment. And reflecting on it the next day.

Got my house cleaned. Got my laundry done. Went out for dinner with my dear friend Megan. Then finished a drawing. Productive weekend!

Ah, my Belle Toujours at Taorima!

"The Collections" premiere was awesome.

And my performance went fine. And now, I can sleep! :)

Stage fright. Jangly.

Can't decide if I'm over-rehearsed or under-rehearsed.

I guess no matter how long I live or how much I perform I will always get nervous beforehand.

If I can just keep it together until about 11 p.m., I'm home free and can just enjoy the film and everyone else's performances. Gonna eat something now and chill out until my call at 7.

Finally finished the drawing

Position One: Dangerose, Felix's Martyr/Felix Christian Martyr


Position Two: Dangerose Ascending (Venice)/Felix Christian Martyr

...I've been working on this week, interrupted by the trip to my mother's house and practicing for tomorrow's performance. It's a diptych with two positions. More from the Epilogue of Les Très Riches Heures.

Now, to bed with me because I have a million things to do before my call at 7 tomorrow evening and need to get up early.

Home from my mother's...

frantically practicing now for tomorrow night's performance. My house is a pit. I got a hundred of the dolls I've made back from a friend who'd had them to document for me and they are now added to the chaos in a huge plastic hopper I can't even get upstairs. There are about a dozen new drawings littering up the space, plus the sketches for three others and another huge one that's three-quarters done. I haven't done dishes in a week, and all my stuff from my trip and every pair of shoes I've worn to work for two weeks is in the mix. Plus the pencil sharpener opened up, spilling shavings all over the chair I sit in to draw.

It looks like an art supply store and clothing boutique exploded in here.

But there's always Sunday, right?

A performance matters more than a tidy space when one is an artist and lives alone. Still, I can't find anything and I'm driving myself crazy. Plus it's 104 degrees and I can't take Buster for long walks. Perhaps my normal routine will be restored next week?

Somnambulit: An Archive of Writings

Bob's death has really made me realize I have to get my archive act together in the coming months. Linda Montano and I talked about this on the telephone today, since she's having exactly the same impulse. In Linda's and my cases we need to worry about not only visual/video/ephemeral work but writing, too.

So, little by little, I've decided I will put up my writing archive on blogger so that it's stored on the web as a portfolio.

If you're interested, check out
http://somnambulit.blogspot.com

So far, all I have up is four stories from Snapshots from the Landlocked Land, 1995. But as I have time I'll put up more. Most of these old pieces only exist on paper or on floppy disks. Yikes! Just as most of my performance documentation exists only on VHS :(

Music video is wrapped and in the can!

Photos on Cindy's facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/album.php?aid=17716&id=1643258944&ref=nf




It was hot as hell at the Cathedral of Junk, but we got it on the first take and did it again three times in other set ups. Playback looked fantastic. Yay! One down, then Saturday night's solo performance to go! Much fun! Can't wait to see the edited version, but the dancers were awesome and I really enjoyed playing with Terri Lords, the excellent drummer. We had a little drum, accordion and melodica Balkan jam during one of the breaks. That's me in the costume I was wearing, standing on top of my car afterward.

To the bathtub and to bed with me now! Work tomorrow. Argh.

Diptych: Girl and Boy

It's like a presentiment, like I'm running from the devil. They just keep coming and I have to get them out, and NOW.

Ink, watercolor, Prismacolor on Arches, each 8 x 10"

There's my girl! Catherine Deneuve, that is.

Manages to eat ice cream WHILE smoking at the Taorima festival in Sicily! God, I love this woman!

Isola del cimitero, Venice.

They just keep coming. Last night's and today's work.
Ink, watercolor, Prismacolor on Arches, 12x 18"

No (Death)

Three night drawing.
Ink, watercolor. Prismacolor on Arches

Damn. I haven't listened to this Amy Winehouse...

CD in about a year. She so called it, all the way. I can't believe these lyrics haven't been ringing in my ears before. But I get it now.



This is exactly how I felt.

I had a thought. When, in the future, the other women in his life are reminding him of our ill-fated romance, I bet they all picture me as Amy Winehouse. I bet our interlude will be known as his "Amy Winehouse affair."

Dreams and sleep have meaning.

Wish Fulfillment? No. But Dreams (and Sleep) Have Meaning
By TIFFANY SHARPLES Tiffany Sharples Tue Jun 16, 4:15 am ET

Dreams may not be the secret window into the frustrated desires of the unconscious that Sigmund Freud first posited in 1899, but growing evidence suggests that dreams - and, more so, sleep - are powerfully connected to the processing of human emotions.

According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)

A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces. In the small analysis of 36 adults, volunteers were asked to interpret the facial expressions of people in photographs, following either a 60- or 90-minute nap during the day or with no nap. Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival, he suggests: "If it's getting food, if it's getting some kind of reward, finding a wife - those things are pretty good to pick up on."

Our daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives."

REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way." (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)

"It's not that you've forgotten. You haven't," he says. "It's a memory of an emotional episode, but it's no longer emotional itself."

That palliative safety-valve quality of sleep may be hampered when we fail to reach REM sleep or when REM sleep is disrupted, Walker says. "If you don't let go of the emotion, what results is a constant state of anxiety," he says.

The theory is consistent with new research conducted by Rebecca Bernert, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Florida State University who specializes in the relationship between sleep and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and who also presented her work at the sleep conference this week.

In her study of 82 men and women between the ages of 18 and 66 who were admitted into a mental-health hospital for emergency psychiatric evaluation, Bernert discovered that the presence of severe and frequent nightmares or insomnia was a strong predictor of suicidal thoughts and behaviors. More than half of the study participants had attempted suicide at least once in the past, and the 17% of the study group who had made an attempt within the previous month had dramatically higher scores in nightmare frequency and intensity than the rest. Bernert found that the relationship between nightmares or insomnia and suicide persisted, even when researchers controlled for other factors like depression.

Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.

If that's the case, it may help explain the recurring nightmares that characterize psychiatric conditions like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Walker says. "The brain has not stripped away the emotional rind from that experience memory," he says, so "the next night, the brain offers this up, and it fails again, and it starts to sound like a broken record ... What you hear [PTSD] patients describing is, 'I can't get over the event.' "

At the biological level, Walker explains, the "emotional rind" translates to sympathetic nervous-system activity during sleep: faster heart rate and the release of stress chemicals. Understanding why nightmares recur and how REM sleep facilitates emotional processing - or hinders it, when nightmares take place and perpetuate the physical stress symptoms - may eventually provide clues to effective treatments of painful mental disorders. Perhaps, even, by simply addressing sleeping habits, doctors could potentially interrupt the emotional cycle that can lead to suicide. "There is an opportunity for prevention," Bernert says.

The new findings highlight what researchers are increasingly recognizing as a two-way relationship between psychiatric disorders and disrupted sleep. "Modern medicine and psychiatry have consistently thought that psychological disorders seem to have co-occuring sleep problems and that it's the disorder perpetuating the sleep problems," says Walker. "Is it possible that, in fact, it's the sleep disruption contributing to the psychiatric disorder?"

Drawing.

And around drawing, practicing accordion and a French song I'm performing.

Another poster about the film and the trailer.

"The Collections" Trailer from turnitloose on Vimeo.

Please come to the opening Saturday, June 27th if you are in the Austin area. $10 admission gets you the DVD or one of Jill Pangallo's books, plus performances by featured collectors and others.

Austin Art Authority is the venue, 10 p.m. start time.

Sunday in the park with Buster

And other than practicing,

I am drawing. And I had a great drawing day.

Saturday, June 27 I'm performing...

and I'm one of the collectors featured in the film.


The Collections: Screening and Performance
a delightfully inexplicable meditation on the topic of stuff
Host:
Max Juren, Jill Pangallo, Monofonus Press
Type:
Music/Arts - Performance
Network:
Global
Start Time:
Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 10:00pm
End Time:
Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 1:00am
Location:
United States Art Authority
Street:
2908 Fruth Street (behind Spider House)
City/Town:
Austin, TX

View Map
Google
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Microsoft
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Email:
info@monofonuspress.com
Description
"The Collections," a new video series by Max Juren and Jill Pangallo is about what people save and why they save it. Inspired by Ann Stephenson's poem of the same name, the series features twelve, short interviews with collectors that provide a jumping off point for Max and Jill's multi-genre video and performance work. Their impulsive and improvisational responses cross-pollinate with the interviews to create a delightfully inexplicable meditation on the topic of stuff. It’s a new, 40-minute collection unto itself, completed from start to finish in just one month’s time.

Conceived, Written, Directed and Performed by Max Juren and Jill Pangallo
Executive Produced by Monofonus Press
Inspired by the poetry of Ann Stephenson

Including the collections of...
Christina Campbell, Juan Cisneros, Michelle Devereux, Kate Hersch, Jen Hirt and Scott Webel, Suze Kemper, Rachel Martin, Haleh Pedram, Michael Smith, Jack Stoney, Josh , and Ross

And featuring…
Elana Farley, Carlos Rosales-Smith, Amanda Joy Venerable as the “Dream Together” cats

Juren and Pangallo will host the premier screening of “The Collections” on Saturday, June 27th at the United States Art Authority in Austin, Texas. The screening event will include a variety of performances by local artists Michelle Devereux, Scott Eastwood, Elana Farley, Rachel Martin, Paul Soileau, Brannon Via, Haleh Padram, Amanda Joy Venerable, and more. The evening begins at 10pm. Entry is $10 with which you receive your choice, FREE, of “The Collections” dvd, Max Juren’s recent compilation DVD release, or Jill Pangallo’s recent book, “Let Me Entertain You,” all published by Monofonus Press. We hope to see you there!

I made Buster an ....

Edward Gorey-esque dog stroller or rickshaw so that I can still go on long walks with him even when it's 100 degrees and he's overcome by the heat. I think it still needs mosquito netting for the total effect I was going for. He is a Goth dog, after all.

Just finished: Bride/The Key

18 x 12" watercolor, ink, Prismacolor on Arches

Feeling a little sad and vulnerable

I think it's because June 7 last year was the first day of the real-life romance I wrote about in Les Très Riches Heures. And part of it is Bob's death.

And maybe it's because coming to the end of a huge artistic project always triggers a kind of post-natal depression in me. I had been writing since January, then editing feverishly during the past month, and now it's all done and out there and I wait. It's a new experience for me, putting what I've made out there. Usually I just make things and never show them to anyone. Since I put this work out there, I feel a little on pins and needles waiting to get some feedback from someone. Ali was, of course, right there, reading in the first few days and she's already given me notes. I do have to examine how I feel about making and showing vs. just making and never showing. Part of me feels that maybe it's time I do put my work out there. I think maybe some lessons I learned from Bob are talking to me these days...

I do know what I'm doing next, though, and started working on the first color plate for that series Sunday night. And I have too many conceptual ideas to even count. But it seems fairly obvious I am going to have to learn some HTML to pull off most of what I can imagine doing in the future.

Quiet Sunday Morning photos up on my flickr.

Book is done!

I made my deadline, even with Bob's sudden death. It was 98% finished last weekend, but I finished dropping in all the bells and whistles last night and today.

Here's part of what I wrote about it: (there was a lot of other heady stuff about devising a Rhetoric of Love and creating virtual intimate spaces, voice being the evidence that the body still exists in modern art and assorted other art school blah-blah-blah.)

"...In other words, I hope I have created a post-modernist naturalistic feminist transmedia Existential Romance novel, with a family tree extending back to Richardson's 1740 work, Pamela." Of course, I have no idea WHAT will happen next with this work, but making it is what I care about.

Now I can sleep again. When I get in "the zone" there's just no stopping me. But I did finally clean house and do laundry today after one month non-stop burning the midnight oil. I'm going to go outside, stare at the moon and have a well-deserved cocktail tonight before I go to sleep to celebrate. My family and friends will probably be glad when I emerge and rejoin the living.

If I can just learn that song by next weekend, I think I'm still doing a music video with Cindy, Jimmie and some of the Kings and others in their circle. It has three chords; surely, even brain-dead I can pull that off.

*****

Beautiful side-effect of Bob's passing: people from decades ago are suddenly making contact with me, or I saw them at the memorial. That's a marvelous thing to come out of a sad event and reminds me, as an artist, that I am not an island. I am, in fact, a member of a huge, vibrant artistic community.

Dear Bob, We celebrated your life tonight...

as an artist, a dear friend, an old love, a magnificent teacher, a family member. Did you see us at Okay Mountain? We all expected to see your white pickup parked in the neighborhood, and all evening we spoke of how eerie it was that we all pictured you in the same spot in the yard in the same seat, with your long legs stretched out. Suze and I went together, fittingly, and brought a huge bottle of your beloved Bulleit bourbon with us for everyone to toast you, with a tag I made for its neck that read, "For Bob, with love, from Hard Women." Your students from all the way back to the 80's (including Suze and me!) were there. Did you hear the stories we shared, and how I told the crowd how it was you who named us Hard Women in the first place, and how you never missed a single show? (Suze had said earlier, "Maybe we should have shared more men?" And I said, "No." You were enough, separated, even, as you were by fifteen or so years in our romantic histories. But that is a funny shared experience between best friends! We'll always have YOU in common. And she told me about how she left a wedding to go have hot sex with you, while the bride, Malka, went next door and visited your beloved friend, Steve Jones.)

And did you see that Suze and I embraced your beloved Peggy, and she clung to us all evening, sometimes with the three of us putting our heads together? We took care of her for you this evening, Bob. She loves you so much, and it was so wonderful to know that you died at the height of a great love. I am so genuinely happy for the two of you, and so sad for Peggy that she must find a way to live on without you.

Your exhibition was beautiful, and even more so because it was works you gave each of us, not work for sale. Everyone shared their stories of how you gave them the works, and there was a tack-up wall of the drawings you'd always made for each crop of your grad students. You were so generous to us!

And I finally met your sister. She said to Suze and me, "You knew him better than I did." She said, "Now I understand why he didn't want to come to our house for the holidays. He had all of you, and was part of this artistic community." Bob, she finally gets it. She sees what you meant to us, that you weren't some kind of crazy recluse. She finally gets it, by hearing our stories and seeing the crowd there to celebrate your life as an artist. Yours was the biggest opening of the year!

There are so many people who will miss you here. We toasted the sky and talked to you -- could you hear us? Go in peace now, my old, gentle, mad sweetheart. Peggy is afraid you'll hover near her and she wants you to be released and find peace. Please hear her heart and do as she needs you to do now. We will take care of her, and her children are clinging close to her.

I regret I didn't have the opportunity to look into your watery blue eyes one more time and see your crooked grin. I regret what I didn't get the chance to say to you, so I'll say it now: Bob, thank you. Thank you for our brief time together, thank you for your art, and thank you for teaching me everything I know about artistic discipline. You were a great artist, a great teacher and a pure, perfect soul. You are loved, and you are missed. At every party we will miss you most of all because we know you would have loved to be with us; and you will be. Linda Montano sends her love, and as I told her just now on the phone, please go back to sleep now, and sweet dreams, my tall boy, my Ichabod.

Sending you my love tonight,
Rachel

And now David Carradine is dead!

This is eerie! Because David Carradine was the movie star doppelganger of my dead former sweetheart! If I had to cast Bob's life, Carradine always seemed to be the perfect choice to play him!

We have no idea how profoundly connected we are to our movie stars. They act out our issues for us. They are our surrogates. This is so strange, that Carradine had no reason to exist now, without Bob.

But obviously life is still worth living with a child and

...daughter-in-law like these two!

And Freak Show A-Go-Go was incredible -- like a queer Cirque de Soleil! And Jimmie's father and wife finally managed to make it to a show after, what? Seven years. I spoke with them for a minute and Jimmie's father made me very happy by saying Hard Women's artistic legacy obviously continues in our child. I was rocking the old Hard Women three foot long pony-tail, Madonna-inspired ringmaster outfit, leopard spats and high-heeled tennis shoes, so I was glad if he was only going to run into me once every six years I was rocking an outrageous look. And he did behave very nicely. I am so glad he was finally able to see exactly what it is his child does as an artist. And I was so proud of all KnT and Jimmie and Cindy had done to pull off this marvelous show.

A dear, old friend of mine has died.

He was also once my love for a few fleeting months five years ago. I am so sad. He was a sweet, gentle, crazy soul, and one of the best and most productive artists I've ever known. He taught me so much about artistic discipline, just as he taught generations of students at school about what it meant to be an artist. I hadn't spent any time with him since October, but I know he had a wonderful girlfriend of a few months with whom he was very happy. It appears he had a peaceful passing in the night. So many more drawings he would have made, so much more fun he would have had.

He will be much missed by so many, including me. Rest in peace, Bob. I will remember you fondly.

I have been constantly surrounded by death since December. When will it let up?

I finished the first final draft of the book and put it out to those who had agreed to be first readers. Now I wait. I would have been high on finishing, but my sadness over Bob's passing has damped down my mood about the book. No one has time to read right now, it seems, so I must be patient. But I stayed on the schedule I established months ago, so I am proud of myself for that.

Death. DEATH.

Why can we not ever have a Commencement without death?

I am completely wiped out from the one that occurred this time. I am just going to crawl into a hole and ignore the world for at least the start of this blessed four day weekend.

Commencement went beautifully, but I cannot shake the dark cloud hanging over it because of another student suicide, this one of a young Korean woman who would have been granted her PhD with flying colors tomorrow.

It's beyond understanding, and my heart is so troubled.

The human heart is so mysterious.

At work, I am dealing with yet another tragic student suicide. I don't want to trivialize the great tragedy by writing about it here. I'll just say it's very sad and my heart goes out to the poor, lost young woman.

Personally, I am suddenly furious with my former lover for his freeze-out since our parting in January. My contempt for him, long coming, has arrived. I am really angry with him now. As Ali says, "He's renting too much real estate in your psyche. I assure you, you aren't in his."

She's right. But I am truly angry, four months later. I guess it took me this long just to get over the sorrow, numbness and horror. But I am now. So the anger has arrived. Cue the orchestra: Carmen's made her entrance.

Another possible trigger: the book's so close to being finished. I think it's very good. My goal is to finish it by symbolic June 7. If I can finish it and simultaneously do the music video and all the other opportunities I have next in queue, that is. If not, shortly thereafter.

I take up no space in his heart or mind or he would have contacted me by now after reading my final posts to our private blog in the last few weeks. I'm erased, invisible, banished. Got it.

Why would he orchestrate this pathetic ending to a beautiful romance, knowing full well I'd lose all respect for him forever in the bargain? I suppose I'm angry with myself for being duped. I loved him, so I thought I knew him. I couldn't have been more wrong. As I wrote him, "I broke my own heart." I own that.

Déjeuner chez Tiffany

Déjeuner chez Tiffany
Originally uploaded by diebuechse

I have been cropping and editing for hours, but most of the shoot is up!

B&W Breakfast at Tiffany's

B&W Breakfast at Tiffany's
Originally uploaded by diebuechse

Just had a great photo session with Ali! I'll be editing for days. Movie Shoot II.

"Love is my religion - I could die for it" John Keats

And evidently one of my former advisees did last week, by his own hand. Tragic. A beautiful boy, a sensitive soul of thirty years. I'm haunted by his death these days.

I always think at the end of a love affair that I will die (or must die, or should die), but I don't. Perhaps that's my tragedy: I live on. I put one foot in front of the other, I breathe, I take meals, I work, I see friends, I shop, I make plans for the future. My life goes on. I survive. But, truly, a part of me has died forever -- the part of me I shared only with my lover.

But, perhaps, with each ending something is also created? A timeless, transcendent space, a kind of metaphysical empty room full of blinding light? An intimate space that may only be shared with one other human being in all the world? And maybe will be again someday? Or so it seems to me.

"In my father's house there are many mansions." And in some of them dwell those I once loved so much I believed I would die if they ceased to love me. Perhaps one day, outside of time and space, we will love again in those rooms full of white light.

I had the most splendid...

Parent-of-a-Specified-Gender Day with my family! Thank you, Jimmie and Cindy and Maya Naomi and Autumn for the gifts and swimming and fun! Love you guys!

And thanks for a wonderful show on Friday, the Kings 'N' Things Seventh Anniversary. Hard to believe you guys are now senior kings of the troupe!

I got leopard spats made for me by Cindy for Mother's Day. I am gonna rock them all over town, and in Paris, too!

Happy Mother's Day to one and all.

Man, woman and child. Because isn't trying to learn be good mothers to each other why we're all here? You know, nurturing, unconditional love, a shoulder to cry on, to teach one another? Without the icky parts of motherhood like constantly worrying, being neurotic or controlling or too critical? I think we should all be like the mother birds and protect each other so that we develop the confidence and independence to fly!

How I love to sit on my patio in the dark..

and play melancholy gypsy melodies on my accordion!

Can't shut my mind off = insomnia, followed by nightmares

A terrible dream last night:

Ali and I were doing a photo shoot in a long, narrow space, walls and floors like my apartment, but easily a hundred yards long and only about six yards wide. The dream had three passages to it, and we moved down the space in thirds.

1. People bundled up in coats and scarves came in as we arrived, as if coming into the space from winter weather. This seems to set my dream in Italy. And the people were all academics known to me from meetings at school or X's colleagues in Italy. Academia. They ignored us as we set our lights and began the shoot.

2. We moved on to the middle of the space. Today the second passage is wiped from my memory, although it was vivid and I didn't think I'd forget it when I awoke from the dream. I think it had to do with X and a tattered top hat in need of repairs. The photo shoot continued in the middle of the space.

3. At the far end of the room we continued the shoot but were having trouble getting my arms in the position needed for the picture. There was a small curtained window in the wall there, and the space behind it was dark, seemingly a deserted, cluttered storage room. It occurred to us that if I put one arm on the sill of the window we could get the shot.

My hand accidentally went into the space behind the curtain as I took the pose. Then, out of nowhere, a dry, hot hand seized my wrist violently and angrily held on. The hand's skin was old, papery. I was terrified and screamed for Ali to help me detach myself from the hand, which would not release its death-hold on my wrist no matter how I twisted and jerked. She couldn't force the hand to release me, either, so reluctantly I struck out with my nails at the person who attacked me behind the curtain. With a sickening feeling I realized I was scratching my attacker's face as my fingertips dug into eyes and a mouth. I didn't want to hurt this invisible attacker, but felt I had no choice since she wouldn't release my wrist and clearly meant me harm. I told myself to wake up so I could end the dream.

The hand belonged to X's friend J, I realized upon awakening.

Horrible! I could venture a psychological analysis but will abstain.

I hate the end of the semester when I am so stressed out at work that it carries over into my dreams!

Photoshop: cheaper than surgery

What I wanted out of life when I was a little girl.

The reality of how it's turned out for me.

These are two things I ponder sometimes as I take Buster on one of our hour-long walks through the park with the iPod earbuds in and music playing in my brain. Listening to music while I walk really facilitates deep thoughts, I find.

I've been fighting off a teeny tiny little attack of the blues; part of that, I'm certain, is my still dealing with the emotional aftermath of the end of my relationship with X. If I get a little blue I always get extremely philosophical. And part of it is probably being 54; it's clear my life is more than half over and I can't waste a moment of what's left for me.

What I wanted "when I grew up" when I was a little girl:
1. To have two children, a boy and a girl, with two different fathers. I wanted one of my babies to be black because I thought black children were much more beautiful than white children :)
2. To join the circus and become an aerialist, trapeze performer or tight-rope walker.
3. I said I never intended to marry.
4. The technical skill to draw, fabricate or sew whatever I imagined -- drawings, dolls, costumes, books.

And, when I became a teenager, these things were added to my wish list:
5. To speak French, to go to Paris and maybe even to live there permanently.
6. To be a stage actress or dancer. Or a writer. Or an artist. Or a photographer. To be famous. To live "la vie Bohème" as much as it's possible in the U.S. in the 20th century.
7. To live in a gypsy vardo or an Airstream. Or an Airstream tricked out like a gypsy vardo.
8. To get my fair share of love, affection, kisses and great sex out of my life. To be thought beautiful by my beloved.
9. To march to the beat of my own drum and be true to myself. To be authentic and sincere.
10. To travel the world.

And then, as a grown-up, after my children were raised and I had fulfilled my obligations to others:
11. To own prescription designer sunglasses, a Louis Vuitton wallet and an Hermès scarf.
12. To make love in and have a great romance play out in Paris and Venice.

It's interesting to assess, at mid-life, how well I succeeded in my original goals. Pretty well, n'est-ce pas, all things considered. I find myself at this stage of my life worrying more about the "will I have time" issues: Will I have time to make every drawing I wanted to make? Will my health and vitality hold up so that I can continue to travel and hoof it relentlessly once I'm at my destination?

Why do I have to sleep eight hours a night? I'm wasting time!
Why does work have unpredictable hours and so many special events that derail me from my personal agenda?
Why do I often just walk around my house in circles finding stupid little putzy things to do rather than the grand projects? And then another evening's wasted, and how many more of them will I have in my lifetime?

That's the issue that seems to emerge as critical for me now, as a woman of a certain age: is there enough time?

And did I get all the kisses and great sex and loving I hoped to get out of this one life of mine?

Another semester draws to a close.

I've felt "meeting'd" to death recently, but things should really begin to wind down next week when the students are no longer attending class. Because of the swine flu epidemic I'll be gladder than usual when class is no longer in session and students aren't thrown together in confined spaces. We'll have a full stop for a couple of weeks before summer term and orientation start up, so maybe that will put the brakes on virus transmission here on campus. I do worry a little about our many international students who'll head home to Mexico at the end of the semester, but perhaps most will stay away all summer.

Awards banquets and concerts and other special end-of-semester activities have kept me up on campus later than usual most nights lately. I look forward to getting back into a routine with walking Buster and drawing nightly once all these special events cease for the summer. We'll have to shift our nightly walks to just before sundown soon due to the oppressive heat and humidity.

Commencement is the 22nd, and, after that, it really will become deathly quiet up here for a while. Honestly, I look forward to that. It's spooky, though, not to be leaving for Europe the day after graduation as I usually do. It will be interesting to be in Austin all summer this year. I'll find ways to stay busy and entertained, I'm certain!

A Woman is a Woman homage...

A woman is woman edit
Originally uploaded by diebuechse

quite tongue in cheek.

The shoot with Ali was exhausting, but fun. I will likely be editing for days, and we didn't get to do six more setups I had planned because they're exteriors and we lost the light. Plus we need to shoot downtown when there's no one around to see the madness! Maybe in the next couple of weeks we'll finish, but it's a good start. 250 photos, but only about two dozen will go in the project.

Violetta? Mimi? No.

Musetta a little. Carmen: yes.

*****

I passed a man on the hike and bike trail today walking Buster. When he was completely past me, I suddenly thought, "Wait! Was that my second husband?!"

Je m'ennuie aujourd'hui!

I bore myself and I am bored, that is. It's been terribly quiet all day at the office due to horrible black skies and rain. We've had barely anyone come in for assistance with anything. I've busied myself cleaning out my email box and other housekeeping tasks, but the day has seemed terribly long. If I had been home there are so many things I could be doing. And now, because of the rain, I won't be able to take Buster on his long walk when I go home and both of us will feel off. I'm really addicted to our hour-long daily walk and get so cranky without it.

But I suppose I can hoop to music indoors if all else fails.

I've been thinking about the next drawing suite I will start, and I think it's Things I Thought I Saw at the Water's Edge -- because as I walk along the shore of Town Lake daily with Buster, a trick of the eye often makes me think I see something I didn't really see at all in the water. Maybe the series will be about a dozen black and white drawings, but the one that gave me the original idea will be big, and in color. I need to tear down paper now that I know what I'm doing next, and do some preliminary studies of water movement and ripples. I've had six months off since I wrapped the last series -- always need battery recharge time between projects -- but I couldn't start the next series without committing to a theme. So, that's settled. The reflective nature of water also will be a good opportunity -- images of duality.

I doubt I'll get much drawing done this week, though. Two evening events for me as the semester wears itself out and ramps down.

I was thinking as I walked Buster yesterday about French popular music, and how common it is in French love songs for the singer to face up to the likely eventual failure of the love affair in advance. They sing things like, "If tomorrow you should cease to love me..." "If you go away.." "If you should have a change of heart..." "If you should no longer love me.." It's odd. I don't think English-language songs as often acknowledge the transitory nature of romantic love. Because my iPod is loaded up with French pop music from the 1920s until now I seem to listen to a lot of those "it's inevitable that our love will end" songs. Piaf sang her fair share of them -- L'Hymne à L'Amour, for instance. And so did Charles Aznavour. I think it's healthier just to confront that probability head-on. Maybe it's a very French thing to realize the love affair is doomed just as you begin it with the first kiss? I always have that feeling myself, I must admit. Still, it doesn't stop me from loving. Because, as Piaf sang so movingly,


If the sky should fall into the sea
And the stars fade all around me
All the times that we have known here
I will sing a hymn to love

We have lived and dreamed we two alone
In a world that's been our very own
With its memories ever grateful
Just for you I sing a hymn to love

I remember each embrace
The smile that lights your face
And my heart begins to sing
Your eyes have never lied
And my heart begins to sing
And my heart begins to sing

If one day you should ever disappear
Always remember these words
If one day we had to say goodbye
And our love should fade away and die
In my heart you will remain here
And I'II sing a hymn to love

O for love, we live eternally
In the blue we'll roll this harmony
With every day we are in heaven
As for you, I'll sing a hymn to love

Don't you ever worry, dear
And the stars shall fade from the sky
All the times that we have known here
I will sing a hymn to our love
Oh darling,
Just for you I sing
A hymn to love

****

Speaking of Piaf, over the weekend I bought my ticket to Paris for October and reserved my hotel rooms, one on the Droit and one on the Rive Gauche. I'll mix it up and enjoy two neighborhoods this trip. I can't stay away from Paris much longer than a year, and passing through those two snowy days at Christmas at the airport don't count. Life is too short not to spend as much of it as possible in Paris.

Detective Movie

Detective Movie
Originally uploaded by diebuechse

Fun photo shoot tonight with Ali as her persona Carmelo Carillo. I'll tidy them all up and post to Flickr soon!

Dialogues of the Carmelites

It will take a long time to get it out of my head. The sickening sound of the metallic clank that accompanies each chop of the guillotine as all the little nuns are beheaded at the end of Poulenc's gorgeous opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, that is. I went last night to see it performed (beautifully!) by Austin Lyric Opera. I could only afford a third balcony seat, but the acoustics were marvelous even there and I do have those mother-of-pear folding opera glasses.

The first time I was exposed to DotC it was twenty some-odd years ago on the radio -- probably one of those weekend broadcasts from the Met. I had been cleaning house and not paying very close attention until the middle of the third act and I still remember how the sound of the chops of the guillotine triggered actual dry heaves in me that first time. I find this work so incredibly powerful and I read it on so many levels.

There's, first, the primarily female cast; rare in opera. The men are the throw-aways in this one. There's the mothers and daughters motif, although they are nuns and spiritual sisters. I can put some feminist reads into it, and a would-be lesbian love-at-first-sight story. There are the existential issues of freedom and transcendence. To me, DotC is less about religion and more about fear, and about the fear of fear. I know those are probably not the things Polenc wanted me to ponder, but I'm a post-modernist and I can't help it.

And there's one of the greatest lines in opera: to paraphrase, "She got somebody else's death, as one might mistakenly be handed someone else's coat in the cloak room."

Rocking that Missionary Look

...like I said I would!

Love these Dutch wax African batiks. I got two skirts, one black, one turquoise, on ebay! I wear them with the Massai-inspired towering sandals and the ubiquitous leopard sweater of which I am so fond. This is a happy ensemble!

But I am still trying to get over that damned stye.

Everything's moving so fast.

It's dizzying, like being on a crazy carousel, as Jacques Brel sang. But it always happens like this in the spring semesters. Everyone waits until the very last moment to conduct business they were either in denial about, or procrastinated beginning. That goes for faculty members AND their students, by the way. Of necessity, this is the season for final recitals, exhibitions, defenses, presentations. And end-of-year banquets and ceremonies and receptions.

As a result, I don't have time to fully write about the many wonderful happenings lately. (B)Easter with Jimmie and Cindy and the little girls was marvelous. I went out to their place for brunch and enjoyed hiding Easter eggs for children to find, something I haven't done for many years. Jimmie made some nice photos of the day which you can see in a set on flickr if you click through from the image of my grand-beauties below.

Friday night's premiere of Queenie Pie, Duke Ellington's opera, was also marvelous. The young, vibrant African-American cast really delivered, and it was a memorable production. Unbelievably, the ninety-something year-old white woman whose notes are what made this staging possible attended the premiere. She had broken her hip a week ago, so none of us expected she'd be able to travel. But travel she did, and made her pre-performance appearance on stage wearing a colorful sequined gown she said Ellington bought for her years ago, with her red-dyed hair and six handsome young men in zoot suits escorting her in in her wheelchair. I loved Queenie Pie's plot about dueling beauticians -- rather Carmen-esque, and the magical Bali Hai island Queenie Pie sails to on a 1930's ocean liner like the Normandie. Hard to believe it hasn't been fully staged somewhere with all the trimmings -- wouldn't it probably do well in London? It needs the kind of production values that, say, Cole Porter's Anything Goes had; the orchestra was also on stage in that one when I saw the 2004 revival.

It enjoyed getting all dressed up to meet up there with friends and to go to the reception afterward to congratulate everyone involved in this ambitious production. I have to work on overcoming my shyness and getting out to do these kinds of things more often. I'm fine, once I'm there. I just don't know what to say to people when it comes to small talk, but it seems to get a little easier with each outing. Practice helps with overcoming the shyness, I'm finding.

Saturday night was my Grey Gardens viewing party. I got HBO just for the week and Alison kindly let me borrow her monstrous television for the evening. It was a potluck affair with cuisine inspired somehow by Grey Gardens, and bizarre couture was required. It was fun to be in a room full of Little Edies, and my photos later revealed an orb hovering over performance artist Jill Pangallo's head. I can only assume it was Little Edie giving us her blessing. The Barrymore/Lang Grey Gardens piece was all I expected and hoped for and I really enjoyed its visuals and insights. Great acting on the parts of the stars! Loved the very believable prosthetic aging effects, too, particularly Barrymore's arms. I haven't watched the Maysles' original documentary for a couple of years and now feel I need to add looking at it again to my already lengthy to-do list for the near future. The viewing party did cause me to have to undertake a major no-holds-barred housekeeping incident, so that was a good side effect. There is still more stuff from those boxes from Italy I need to deal with or find homes for hidden about. There are still materials for future steam-punking projects lurking in cabinets and closets.

Work will be hectic all this week and we've got construction-related activities going on to further complicate everything. Friday night it's Dialogues of the Carmelites. Whee!

Me as Little Edie, Buster as Raccoon

Me as Little Edie, Buster as Raccoon
Originally uploaded by diebuechse

...at my Grey Gardens viewing party last night. Click through to see the whole set, including the ectoplasmic orb!

Beaster at Jimmie's house

DSC_0704.JPG
Originally uploaded by jimmie d. jewell

with my beauties, my little granddaughters. Click through to see the whole set.

Headed out for a night at the opera

... and I am so excited! World premiere of Duke Ellington's Queenie Pie at Butler School of Music tonight!

Streaming video here:
http://www.music.utexas.edu/calendar/details.aspx?id=9595

I don't know if the technology will work, but you can try checking it out. I attended a recital yesterday by the young woman singing Café Olay and her exquisitely lovely and powerful voice made the little hairs on my forearms stand up, so that's probably a very good indication that the production will be marvelous. Full report later.

Today's the twenty-ninth birthday of my firstborn, who is far away tonight in Portland or environs. I miss him so, and it's hard to believe he's now only a year shy of thirty. Twenty-nine years ago he'd just come flying out of my body after only four hours' labor. He was always in a hurry to fly, mon petit oiseau Nicholas. He said he celebrated by going up in a private airplane -- always hoping to get his pilot's license, that one.

Oh, yes I did!

buy that Hermès twilly in the design Brides de Gala. And, yes, I did wear it as a headband and walk the dog in the park just now. And, yes, it felt fabulous!

The little Hermès hat box with ribbons it came in is also a little treasure!

And, yes, I do have a stye in my left eye I'm getting over. I attribute that to the fact that it's been a very stressful week at work. But this gorgeous little scarf has gone a very long way toward making me feel wonderful today!

A letter I won't send: It's tragic that you deprived yourself of all this...

because, when all is said and done, it all boils down to this: truly, you could not take the risk. (You could not eat the peach.) You preferred the familiar sadness, the moral "correctness" of staying in name only in a marriage from which you continually seek to escape, whether through moving halfway across the world or through your several emotional or sexual affairs. It's sad, too, because you were so completely safe with me. But you were afraid. It must have been terrifying, to have all you said you dreamed of right in front of you, for the taking.

This is my family. One of my little granddaughters wears a dress and bonnet made for me in 1961 by my mother; the other wears my leopard heels. My own younger child, out of frame, takes the photograph, and I play the accordion.

The younger of my granddaughters is singing a song, à la Piaf, while accompanied by two melodicas, an accordion, and her sister on one of your minor key harmonicas. Our eight-year-old chanteuse composed her song on the spot. It's about an ended romance. It's about all the things that were sent back in boxes. The last words of her song are, "He's just a little man." She's brilliant, and her lyrics come from a deep, authentic, healthy place. We're a tribe of adherents to a philosophy of radical honesty, you see. We inhabit your Paradise Lost. And we rag-tag gypsies WILL BE HAPPY. We seek, and find JOY on a daily basis.

You've lost not only me, but all this. A tribe of women and girls will now wear what once were your clothes, your ties, your sock garters, your watch, your rings. They will play your harmonicas.

It's a tragedy. You, as my beloved, had earned the right to partake of this magical, nomadic feast, to enter a world of radical truthfulness to which you'll never, ever again be offered an invitation. My people were all standing by ready to welcome you as my chosen one, my beloved. It is a world of great beauty -- unimaginable, in fact, to outsiders -- and I am sorry that you will not be part of it. It might have filled some of that abyss inside you. It might have helped heal some of your terrible wounds.

It's on nights like these that I'll remember you most often and be a little sad. Not because I miss you and you are lost to me. But because of all you yourself deprive yourself of and have lost. Tu es perdu à nous et tout est perdu à toi. But the red wine will flow, we will make the music and I will sing and dance. Because, unlike you, I am always passionately committed to being fully IN LIFE.

Ultimately, that's why our relationship could not work out: I am committed to being fully in life and you most probably have chosen to turn your back on all these joys and spend much of your time in darkness. I'm not angry at you for rejecting ME. I'm angry that you reject life, and joy. What a waste. What ingratitude to life for all its riches.

Cool.

Someone wrote me asking if they could publish one of my flickr portfolio photos. I said yes. Another was picked up to go on a fashion web site.

The internet is a wild and wonderful place, huh? For artists, it's a way to finally get published and exhibit without cost. I like that part.

I can rock that.

I figured out a way to tie a silk bow tie from Italy so that it makes a rather charming choker with a bow. And there's a pocket square to coordinate with each of the two bow ties. When I want to wear Dietrich drag to work in the future, I can rock those ties as chokers under an open necked shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, which I'll wear with a vest. And argyle socks. And spectator shoes. And with that cologne, Heritage, he selected at Guerlain on the Champs Elysées.

Because he sent that back to me, too.

Part of me really wants to know why the ending of the romance couldn't have been like Intermezzo (1939). Or Brief Encounter (1946). "How apt that this beautiful film is named Intermezzo, a term that connotes a short musical piece played between two longer movements. --Netflix"

New Works Festival.

I have seen such incredible young, raw, fresh, vibrant works. For a whole week now. But now my feet are killing me from traipsing around to all these spaces wearing ridiculous shoes, trying to look nice out of respect for all the shows and their young directors, choreographers and performers. And I'm sleep deprived. I started just crashing on the couch when I came in at midnight -- stripped out of my clothes, left them lying on the floor. Didn't have time to do laundry this week, go to the grocery store or eat any vegetables most days. The festival's over tonight though. Wah :(

But (sigh) of relief. I will try to clean house tomorrow. And I just went and got a massage, which I sorely needed after this long, long packed week. Another unbelievably marvelous festival.

A box arrived.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, second part of 11, 13. And a bunch of other objects, once gifts from me to the sender -- or little things of mine with no value at all.

Still missing:
6, 7, 9, first part of 11, 12.

What kind of head-trip is this anyway? It's baffling. It's my things and the sender's things, not clearly one or the other, in these expensive-to-send boxes full of pathetic, unwanted objects.

I suppose I'm meant to feel erased? Whatever comfort he can find for himself is good. Or perhaps I'm meant to feel grateful that he went to the trouble and expense to send the things after I asked him not to? I don't feel at all grateful. It seems so ungrateful to the universe for the rare gift of love and intimacy it once bestowed on us to now return the symbols of our romance. I find all this endless box-sending, frankly, inexplicable in motive, materialistic and, really, quite sad.

Life is, after all, simultaneously so long, so short, so rich, so painful. And all we have is today, and when today ends, only our memories, which are our treasures.

But I guess I'm a romantic...

I like this photo.

I took it at my desk yesterday. I have really big hair. I was trying to look like Brigitte Bardot in an old movie. I was wearing my ballet flats, a printed full skirt and a sweater set. And liquid eyeliner.

A list of random objects?

1. Venus in Furs
2. Yellow cashmere sweater, argyle pattern
3. Two silk bow ties, four pair silk knot cufflinks
4. Ferdinand, the Flower-Smelling Bull.
5. Burgundy flats, spectator style
6. Rubber riding boots
7. Velvet dress, vintage, sleeveless sheath, the color of old theatre seats
8. Ballet pink 3/4 sleeve top
9. A little fur piece -- dyed rabbit?
10. Blue jeans skirt
11. Chocolate brown nail polish, greenish-black eye shadow
12. Waterman pen
13. French Foreign Legion button, beribboned

It's a kind of Joseph Cornell assemblage of the wardrobe.

Facebook is truly evil.

I really don't have anything to write here. Too much "Six Degrees of Separation" research to do on facebook at the moment. And too much flair to make and send to people. I am seriously addicted. I love to make things on the internet.

A "six degrees" facebook example: it turns out one of my former students is friends with someone who was an undergraduate in art school with me during the last century...

Plath's Son Commits Suicide

...in Alaska

Associated Press

Monday, 23 March 2009

Nicholas Hughes, the son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has killed himself. His death was 46 years after his mother committed suicide and almost 40 years to the day after his stepmother, Assia Wevill, did the same. He was 47.

Hughes, who was not married and had no children, hanged himself at his home on 16 March, Alaska State Troopers said. An evolutionary biologist, he spent more than a decade on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Marmian Grimes, the university's senior public information officer, said he left about a year ago.

Hughes' older sister, poet Frieda Hughes, issued a statement through The Times, expressing her "profound sorrow" and saying that he "had been battling depression for some time."

Nicholas Hughes was only 9 months old when his parents separated, and still an infant when his mother died in February 1963. A few months earlier, she had written of Nicholas: "You are the one/Solid the spaces lean on, envious/You are the baby in the barn."

Not widely known when she died, Plath became a cult figure and feminist martyr through the novel "The Bell Jar," which told of a suicidal young woman, and through the "Ariel" poems she had been working on near the end of her life.

The immediate cause of their breakup was Ted Hughes' affair with Wevill, and Plath's fame would long haunt her husband, hounded for years by women who believed he was responsible for her suicide and by a procession of scholars and fans obsessed with the brief, impassioned and tragic marriage between the two poets.

Ted Hughes would relive the tragedy not only through the constant reminders of Plath, but also through the suicide of Wevill, his second wife, who in March 1969 killed herself and their four-year-old daughter.

Hughes, England's poet laureate, was reluctant to discuss Plath until near the end of his life when he published the best-selling "Birthday Letters," a collection of deeply personal poems that came out in 1998. He died of cancer the same year.

Gay Bi Gay Gay

...is where I spent yesterday. It was pretty fab. It's the gay/bi/trans/? version of SXSW. Imagine Woodstock in someone's backyard in East Austin (the ghetto) filled with typical Austin pierced/tattoo'd funky-clothes wearin' folk with live bands taking the stage every hour. Jimmie and Cindy were face painting there and I had had the little girls, feeding them lunch, taking them swimming, for the earlier part of the day before I delivered them back to their adults. It was fun. I saw people I haven't seen for twenty years in some cases. And all my former daughter-in-laws. And all Jimmie's former housemates. Old Home Week.

I can see that facebook is going to be a major competitor for my leisure time and blogging here. I can't get over all the gift applications people have created. I was sent "the line between past and present" from the Grey Gardens Treasures by a friend. And I spent the better part of the past two days on the site making flair (buttons) to send friends. The first set was Art School Stuff (Duchamp readymades, Surrealists) and the second set was Cross-Dressing Female Movie Stars (Katharine Hepburn, Dietrich, Garbo, Brooks, Moreau, etc.). I like the "play time" aspect of facebook more than the social networking part. Evidently everyone is up in arms about a recent redesign, but since I just got on it last Thursday, it's fine with me. Downside is you can only write about a hundred characters in each post, keeping it short and sweet. Guess I still need the blog to totally unburden my wordy self.