The year in books

Some statistics

137
Number of books read in 2009

58
Number of non-fiction titles

69
Number of fiction titles
(excluding graphic novels and Shakespeare retellings)

5
Number of graphic works

5
Number of plays and related retellings

This year's "On the nightstand" entries
12.24.2009
11.30.2009
11.06.2009
10.12.2009
9.21.2009
9.20.2009
8.12.2009
7.13.2009
6.28.2009
6.06.2009
5.10.2009
4.24.2009
4.12.2009
3.26.2009
3.16.2009
2.28.2009
1.31.2009

Books read
The following titles are arranged in (approximate) order read. I've boldfaced this year's particularly exceptional reading experiences.

■ Outside Lies Magic (John R. Stilgoe)
■ Field Notes from a Catastrophe (Elizabeth Kolbert)
■ Diary of a Provincial Lady (E.M. Delafield)
■ Walking through Walls: A Memoir (Philip Smith)
■ What I Saw And How I Lied (Judy Blundell)
■ Test (William Sleator)
■ Little Brother (Cory Doctorow)
■ Daemon (Daniel Suarez)
■ Ender in Exile (Orson Scott Card)
■ Julius Caesar (Shakespeare)
■ Julius Caesar (Adam McKeown)
■ Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)
■ Reading the OED (Ammon Shea)
■ The Hours before Dawn (Celia Fremlin)
■ A War of Gifts: An Ender Story (Orson Scott Card)
■ Drawing with Charcoal, Chalk, and Sanguine Crayon
■ Studying Suzuki Piano: More Than Music (Carole L. Bigler)
■ In the Kingdom of the Fairies (Susan Coyne)
■ Nikon D40/D40x Digital Field Guide (David D. Busch)
■ First Meetings in Ender's Universe (Orson Scott Card
■ Your Child's Strengths (Jenifer Fox)
■ American Wife (Curtis Sittenfeld)
■ The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery)
■ Packaging Girlhood (Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown)
■ Watchmen (Alan Moore) *
■ Company (Max Barry)
■ Edvard Munch (Jim Whiting)
■ The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush (Ann Gerhart)
■ Edvard Munch (Alf Boe)
■ Fool (Christopher Moore) *
■ Owls in the Family (Farley Mowat)
■ Beowulf (Robert Nye)
■ The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl (Shauna Reid)
■ Hold Tight (Harlan Coben)
■ Brief Gaudy Hour (Margaret Campbell Barnes)
■ The Digital Photography Book (Scott Kelby)
■ Admission (Jean Hanff Korelitz)
■ The Glister (John Burnside)
■ Who Do You Think You Are? (Alyse Myers)
■ Masters of Deception: Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical Illusion (Al Seckel)
■ Graphic Works of Max Klinger
■ A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers (Elaine Showalter)
■ The Solitary Vice: Against Reading (Mikita Brottman)
■ The Pursuit of the Perfect (Tal Ben-Shahar)
■ Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary (Pamela Dean)
■ If I Stay (Gayle Forman)
■ Unwind (Neal Shusterman)
■ The Compound (S. A. Bodeen)
■ Columbine (Dave Cullen)
■ The Armchair Birder (John Yow)
■ Harvard Medical School Guide to Lowering Your Blood Pressure
■ Schooling for Life: Reclaiming the Essence of Learning (Jacqueline Grennon Brooks)
■ The Adoration of Jenna Fox (Mary E. Pearson)
■ The Girl Who Played with Fire (Stieg Larsson)
■ How Lincoln Learned to Read (Daniel Wolff)
■ The Principles of Uncertainty (Maira Kalman)
■ The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)
■ After Photography (Fred Ritchin)
■ Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse
■ The Actor and the Housewife (Shannon Hale)
■ Dead Until Dark (Charlaine Harris)
■ Living Dead in Dallas (Charlaine Harris)
■ Club Dead (Charlaine Harris)
■ Dead to the World (Charlaine Harris)
■ The Appeal (John Grisham)
■ Lost and Found (Andrew Clements)
■ The End of the Alphabet (CS Richardson)
■ Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
■ The Last Child (John Hart)
■ Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt)
■ Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw (Deborah Kogan Ray)
■ The Girlhood Diary of Wanda Gág, 1908-1909: Portrait of a Young Girl (Wanda Gág; edited by Megan O'Hara)
■ Millions of Cats (Wanda Gág)
■ Nothing at All (Wanda Gág)
■ Gone Is Gone (Wanda Gág)
■ The Report Card (Andrew Clements)
■ Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture (Kirsten Olson)
■ The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education (Maya Frost)
■ The Body of Christopher Creed (Carol Plum-Ucci)
■ Guide to Joining the Military (Scott A. Ostrow)
■ Best Friends Forever (Jennifer Weiner)
■ NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children (Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman)
■ Prairie Plants of Northern Illinois: Identification and Ecology (Russell R. Kirt)
■ A Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-Central North America (Peterson Field Guide)
■ A Guide to Field Identification: Wildflowers of North America
■ Tallgrass Prairie Wildflowers: A Field Guide to Common Wildflowers and Plants of the Prairie Midwest (Doug Ladd and Frank Oberle)
■ A Field Guide to the Wildflowers of North America
■ Prairie in Your Pocket: A Guide to Plants of the Tallgrass Prairie (Mark Muller)
■ Where the Sky Began (John Madson)
■ Prairie: A Natural History (Candace Savage)
■ Peterson Field Guides: The North American Prairie
■ Lighting Their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, Shook-up World (Rafe Esquith)
■ The Westing Game (Ellen Raskin)
■ Leisure: The Basis of Culture (Josef Pieper) *
■ Velocity (Dean Koontz)
■ The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir (Laurie Sandell)
■ Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Colors of Light (Wanda M. Corn)
■ The Art of Andrew Wyeth (Wanda M. Corn)
■ Blue Dog (George Rodrigue)
■ The Vermeer Interviews: Conversations with Seven Works of Art (Bob Raczka)
■ Betsy-Tacy (Maud Hart Lovelace)
■ The Wretched Stone (Chris Van Allsburg)
■ Much Ado about Nothing (Shakespeare)
■ What Now? (Ann Patchett)
■ A Gate at the Stairs (Lorrie Moore)
■ The Miles Between (Mary E. Pearson)
■ The Other Daughter (Lisa Gardner)
■ Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All in Your Head (Carla Hannaford)
■ Bal-A-Vis-X : Rhythmic Balance/Auditory/Vision eXercises for Brain and Brain-Body Integration (Bill Hubert)
■ Brain Gym: Simple Activities for Whole Brain Learning (Paul F. Dennison)
■ Brain Gym for Business: Instant Brain Boosters for On-the-Job Success (Gail E. Dennison)
■ Hamlet (John Marsden)
■ Await Your Reply (Don Chaon)
■ The Writing Class (Jincy Willett)
■ Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar (James Marcus Bach)
■ Stitches: A Memoir (David Small)
■ Devil Dog Diary (Will Price)
■ The Daughter of Time (Josephine Tey)
■ The Unit (Ninni Holmqvist)
■ Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
■ William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (Bruce Coville)
■ Manhood for Amateurs (Michael Chabon)
■ Sharp Objects (Gillian Flynn)
■ The Hour I First Believed (Wally Lamb)
■ Julia Child: A Life (Laura Shapiro)
■ A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
■ Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works (Daniel T. Willingham)
■ Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)
■ Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
■ Under the Dome (Stephen King)
■ Tomorrow When the War Began (John Marsden)
■ Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine & a Miracle (Brian Dennis)
■ Crow Call (Lois Lowry)
■ The Housekeeper and the Professor (Yoko Ogawa)
■ Fat Cat (Robin Brande)
■ The Wrong Mother (Sophie Hannah)
■ The Sacrifice (Kathleen Benner Duble)

* Unfinished but not forgotten

Fine Art Friday Sunday, Conclusion

Yes, a month separates this post from my first two posts (here and here) about our November trip to the Art Institute, but that's all right.

The reference for the above sketch is Max Beckmann's 1937 painting, Self Portrait. Because the Misses and I were elbow-deep in our portrait class at the time of our visit, we found ourselves closely observing faces in art. And, oh, how many ways they can be depicted and still reveal essential truths about the subject, about being human, perhaps even about the artist (although not always)!

Consider the following faces. Style and subject vary greatly but essential truths remain.

■ Little Sneerer, 1944 (Jean Dubuffet, French, 1901-1985)

■ Imaginary Portrait of Lautréamont at the Age of Nineteen Obtained According to the Paranoiac-Critical Method, 1937 (Salvador Dalí, Spanish, 1904-1989)

■ The Image Disappears, 1938 (Dalí)

■ Isaku Yanaihara, 1956 (Alberto Giacometti, Swiss, 1901-1966)

■ Max Herrmann-Neisse, 1913 (Ludwig Meidner, German, 1884–1966)
(Aside: The Misses thought this looked like one of their science heroes. What do you think?)

■ Nude Under Pine Tree, 1959 (Pablo Picasso, Spanish, 1881-1973)

Speaking of nudes, under trees or otherwise, I have pored over Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life, but only my gesture drawings even begin to approach facility when drawing (clad!) people. I couldn't help but wonder how I would ever learn to draw the human body (clad or not) correctly. How?

And then (Serendipity! Synchronicity! Synthesis!) last night, Mr. M-mv and I watched The Tudors, Episode 1 of Season 3. Lady Ursula Missledon, recently seduced by Sir Francis Bryan, reclines before a large bay window, toying with her new necklace and listening to her lover recite poetry. I recalled some of Berger's observations about nudity versus nakedness (see this entry) and decided that Missledon appeared to be both nude and naked. More, the manner in which her body is framed by the window renders it as much a part of the outdoor landscape as the scene outside -- to this amateur-artist's developing eye, anyway. She isn't a spine and limbs and a head and, oh, how do I make this real? Her flesh is simply a landscape well lit, and I thought, That is how to draw the human body. Begin by considering it a landscape. Hills, valleys, plains. Planes. Our professor repeatedly emphasized the need to observe the planes at work on any face. They are, of course, equally at work on any body.

Amazing.

To bring this all home, I will tell you that long before we had stopped in front of Beckmann, resplendent in his tuxedo, long before I had hastily sketched his heavy-lidded eyes in a style I hoped would later remind me of the original, we had, Mr., the Misses, and I, agreed that the Modern Wing is, in a word, ugly.

It is ugly beyond understanding, beyond reason, beyond belief. It's cold. Sterile. Uninviting. It gives off an odor of impermanence and indifference, of the hastily assembled and decorated. It feels more like an oversized window display than the much anticipated home of the Art Institute's treasure trove of modern art. More, the Wing does not even attempt to appear integrated with what came before.

Its contents remain part of what, to our imaginations, is one of the most compelling narratives in the Art Institute's collection. Sure enough. But the Wing itself?

Ugly.

"The year is dying in the night...."

From "The Case Against New Year's Eve," Simon Winchester's article in Saturday's WSJ:

New Year madness is a thing of quite modern making, and hardly an improvement on the tradition that long preceded it, which called for a somewhat sober, respectful and reflective morning celebration. I blame the Scots for the worldwide embrace of midnight debauchery. And, of course, whoever it was that, some little while beforehand, went and invented public clocks.

Clocks are the real key. The whole notion of bidding formal and raucous farewell to the Old and offering optimistic greeting to the New was something that could really only occur once we in the public square knew when the exact moment of midnight was. Until the manufacture of proper clock escapements, and until Galileo exhibited the marvels of the pendulum, the slow appearance of dawn just had to do. First light was the only clue anyone had as to the start of a new year.

And while we're on the subject of New Year's (and, by extension, most people's inclination to make resolutions), remember this early M-mv exhortation (from 2003):

Let's see. What else? Oh, yes. [Thursday] is New Year's Eve. Let me appeal to your petulant elitist side (as opposed to your lurking egalitarian side), and entreat you to make no "promises to self" that involve measuring your food or rearranging your bedroom to accommodate a large, ugly treadmill or other torture device. If rooms must be arranged, let it be to make way for more bookshelves or a roll-top desk with countless cubbies. Nordic Track, indeed. What, bosh. Walk to the bookstore or the library if you need to tone and firm. But invite ugliness into your home? Bleah. Never.

Avoid resolving to lose ten pounds, run two miles daily, and get up at 5 a.m. every day to accomplish it. These are resolutions built like Chevy Cavaliers and Nabisco Sugar Wafers (that is, not to last).

Similarly, avoid the dangerous slip-slide in self-pity and -recrimination that can be the thirty-six hours before January 1. (Hint: The slip-slide usually begins when you reluctantly switch from seasonal music, and in a desperate bid to find music to which you can relate, you put on a station or cd that violently jerks you back to your late teens and early twenties.) Folks, this is not where you want to be.

Stop the insanity!

Put on some jazz or classical. Relax with a cup of Trader Joe's French roast and a small slice of their New York cheesecake.

Ah, better.

Now.

If you must list and sort and promise, well, will these work?

(1) Resolve to read more, think more, write more, learn more.

(2) Subscribe to a magazine that opens new worlds to you. (No, Entertainment and People don't count.)

(3) Promise yourself more than twenty minutes daily to think, a space-time into which nothing and no one can creep without your express mental invitation. It is in this quiet zone that you will uncover your creativity.

(4) Begin a correspondence with someone who will share your reading discoveries.

(5) Keep a reading log, noting favorite passages.

These are resolutions built to last.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

On the nightstand

Another hasty "On the nightstand" entry.

Recently completed
■ Julia Child: A Life (Laura Shapiro)
A delightful short bio that I picked up after watching Julie & Julia. And about that... I know I am not alone in wishing that it had been simply Julia. Streep and Tucci were a delight.

■ A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
The Misses and I read this holiday classic along with an unabridged narration featuring the incomparable Jim Dale.

■ Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (Daniel T. Willingham)
This was actually a lot better than it sounds.

■ Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)
I finished this book bewildered and dissatisfied. Wondering if I were alone in thinking that it's just pseudo-science masquerading as erudition, I poked around and found this NYT review:

The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.

Yeah. That pretty much sums it up for me, too.

■ Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
A "thumping good read" if ever there were one. Old-fashioned, well-written, melodramatic, memorable.

■ Under the Dome (Stephen King)
It began so promisingly, I thought, Ah! Could this be The Stand for the twenty-first century? It's not. Ergh. Not recommended. At. All.

■ Tomorrow When the War Began (John Marsden)
Nearly forgot this one. And that should tell you something.

■ Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine & a Miracle (Brian Dennis)
■ Crow Call (Lois Lowry)
Just two sweet read-alouds. Look. The kids are never too old for warm chocolate chip cookies, ice-cold milk, and quality picture books. Never.

What I'm reading now
■ The Wrong Mother (Sophie Hannah)
It's good... just what I'm in the mood for: a psychological thriller written well enough that I can say, Rendell-like.

What I plan to read next
■ Fat Cat (Robin Brande)
Because Book Moot recommended it.

■ Boot Camp (Todd Strasser)
No, not that kind of boot camp -- the kind where kids learn to behave.

You'll find the "On the nightstand" archive here.

A contemporary Christmas song I actually like: "Driving Home for Christmas."

Drawn to drawing redux

Here are some more images from our recent class in portraits.

Miss M-mv(i) also revisited one of her earlier subjects:

And Miss M-mv(ii) decided to try her skills on a live subject.

He was delighted with the results, and he's not even a relative! Heh, heh, heh.

Related entries
■ From our sketchbooks (11.08.2009)

■ (The continuing pursuit of) Fine Art (on) Friday (11.13.2009)

The orchid hypothesis

From "The Science of Success" (The Atlantic, December 2009):

The neurotics and the bullies meet quite different fates. The neurotics mature late but do okay. The females become jumpy mothers, but how their children turn out depends on the environment in which the mothers raise them. If it’s secure, they become more or less normal; if it’s insecure, they become jumpy too. The males, meanwhile, stay within their mothers’ family circles an unusually long time—up to eight years. They’re allowed to do so because they don’t make trouble. And their longer stay lets them acquire enough social savvy and diplomatic deference so that when they leave, they usually work their way into new troops more successfully than do males who break away younger. They don’t get to mate as prolifically as more confident, more assertive males do; they seldom rise high in their new troops; and their low status can put them at risk in conflicts. But they’re less likely to die trying to get in the door. They usually survive and pass on their genes.

Back in June, I urged you to visit Ted, a sit devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading" (Technology, Entertainment, Design).

Now I'd like to encourage you to check out Sputnik Observatory, a site dedicated to the study of contemporary culture.

"And if you want the truth, I ain’t so crazy about Thanksgiving or Labor Day either!"

I can’t think of anything that’s dumber.
To a grouch, Christmas is a bummer!

Beaming faces everywhere.
Happiness is in the air.
I’m telling you, it isn’t fair!
I hate Christmas!

People loaded with good will,
Giving presents. What a thrill!

That slushy nonsense makes me ill.
I hate Christmas!

I’d rather have a holiday like normal grouches do.
Instead of getting presents, they take presents back from you!

Here comes Santa, girls and boys!
So who needs that big red noise?
I’ll tell him where to put his toys.
I hate Christmas!

And if you want the truth, I ain’t so crazy about Thanksgiving or Labor Day either!

Christmas carols to be sung.
Decorations to be hung.
Oh, yeah? Well, I stick out my tongue!

I hate Christmas!

Christmas bells play loud and strong.
Hurts my ears, all that ding-dong.
Besides, it goes on much too long!

I hate Christmas!

I’d rather have a holiday with a lot less joy and flash,
With a lot less cheerful smiling, and a lot more dirty trash, yeah!

Christmas Day is almost here.
When it’s over, then I cheer!
I’m glad it’s only once a year.
I hate Christmas!

HT: Semicolon. I'm with you.

Fine Art Friday

As I mentioned in this entry, I've been watching John Berger's television program, "Ways of Seeing." I've recently finished Episode Two, which focuses on the female nude in the European painting tradition. As Berger observes, "Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress."

For your convenience, I've reposted the links for Episode One in addition to the links for Episode Two.

"Ways of Seeing," Episode One
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

"Ways of Seeing," Episode Two
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Profound and pedestrian

Note: The following entry was first posted just about four years ago today and appears below with minor changes. It's worth noting that I re-watched the movie mentioned in this post on the anniversary of my last viewing by coincidence, not plan.

"I almost always cry at the end of a play," Donna once wrote. (It is funny that I have never heard Donna speak, yet I know—or believe I know—her cadences well. And had she not written another word, I believe I would have been able to complete (or at least complement) her thought: Not because the play concluded tragically, necessarily, but because it had concluded at all.)

"But I cry tears of joy for the participants."

Yes. Theater is a catharsis, and we laugh and we cry and we clap as the experience draws to a close.

How can it be over already? we wonder. We just got here.

Miss M-mv(i) learned this sometimes painful lesson in May 2004.

She wept after a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, her first live-theater experience. "It's over already," she cried softly into my ear. "It was so. wonderful."

Oh, I know, sweetie. I know. It almost always is.
___________________________

As I tidied the kitchen, I began to sing a bit from a much maligned musical:

Gus is the Cat at the Theatre Door.
His name, as I ought to have told you before,
Is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss
To pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus.

I don't know when it became popular to loathe Cats. Its poetry, after all, is no more or less ridiculous than, say, Carroll's "Jabberwocky."

I rather like it.

Ayup. I do.

Yes, I most certainly prefer

Mcavity's a ginger cat, he's very tall and thin;
You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in.
His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed;
His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed.

to most anything, say, Jack Prelutsky concocts. And it takes an admirable sort of poet to rhyme this sentence

There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.

to another, no?

Heh, heh, heh.
___________________________

When Mr. M-mv and I were undergrads, our student unions often offered two-for-one ticket deals for Broadway shows. During those lean, so lean, years of college and early married life, we managed to see A Chorus Line, Cats, and later Les Miserables (four times). Our seats were always excellent, and what I remember best about Cats was that the players frolicked in the aisles—they were thisclose.

I loved it!

My early theater experiences (high school and college) were, I guess, rather pedestrian: They're Playing Our Song, Evita, Forty-Second Street, A Chorus Line, Cats, The Fantastiks (off-Broadway), Les Miserables. Some Gilbert and Sullivan. Arms and the Man at a Princeton U. theater. School and university productions of Carousel and Carnival and Anything Goes and Plaza Suite and Suddenly Last Summer. Regional theater productions of Fiddler on the Roof and The Fantastiks. And so on.

But the larger-than-life-ness of the experiences were anything but pedestrian.

Later…

Sunset Boulevard at the Civic Opera House. Rent. Othello and other plays (familiar and not) at smaller theaters around Chicago. Hubbard Street Dance Company. The Joffrey Ballet. Mikhail Baryshnikov and the White Oak Project. Mamet at the Steppenwolf. (Oh, I remember the production so clearly—the young boy in the cast was surreally wonderful—but the name, the name….) Signal Ensemble Theater. Shakespeare Project of Chicago. The American Ballet Theater. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

"I almost always cry at the end of a play," wrote Donna.

Oh, yes, I, too, almost always cry at the end of a performance because unless it's the most dreadful production on Earth, the point of theater (and dance and musical concerts) is live—this is happening right now, so anything is possible!—performance. So, as it ends, Oh, wonderful! we cry. You did it! You did it! Thank you! Thank you! I loved being here!

I cry, too, Donna.

And I think that's what makes us human, my friend.
___________________________

This evening, Mr., the Misses, and I watched Logan's Run. Why? a few of you are, no doubt, wondering. Because it's a sci-fi classic in its own right.

And because we wanted to.

Logan 5 and Jessica 6 have made it to the ruins of Washington, D.C. They marvel at the wrinkles and gray hairs of the old man they meet, and the old man talks to them about his cats:

…[A] cat must have three different names. First of all, there's the name that the family use daily….

And I thought, Yes, that's right. To a citizenry raised in a bubble, a manufactured city in which no one lives past thirty, this doddering old man's recitation from T.S. Eliot's The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats must ring in profound peals.

They don't know what cats are.

They don't know what old is.

They don't know what it is to be buried.

Or to fear dying without someone to bury (and remember) you.

To them, all of this is new, and immediate, and ever so much larger than life as they once knew it.

"Gus is the cat at the theatre door," the old man introduces one of his feline companions to this Brave New World's Adam and Eve. "His name, as I ought to have told you before, is really Asparagus. That's such a fuss to pronounce, that we usually call him just Gus."

Logan and Jessica nod, enchanted.
___________________________

MIRANDA: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!

PROSPERO: 'Tis new to thee.

___________________________

There is, at the confluence of thought and experience, a moment of such clarity that we can hardly bear to look at it.

Life is both profound and pedestrian.

And I cry, too.

Semicolon hosts "The Saturday Review of Books." Consider participating this week.

Fine Art Friday

The guy or gal who dreamed up "Adopt a Dot" deserves some job security.

Inspired by the one hundred twenty-fifth anniversary of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (George Seurat, 1884), the "Adopt a Dot" program offers Art Institute of Chicago members a chance "to connect personally to one of the museum's most beloved masterpieces and help the museum raise more Annual Fund revenue."

You can adopt a dot in any of six colors: blue, light blue, red, pink, green, and black. Dots sell for $10 each; 3 for $25; or 6 for $50 and, in return, you receive a button in the dot's color and a card describing the dot's role in Seurat's painting.

Because you must be a member to purchase a dot, the museum hopes "to leverage this program as an exclusive-member opportunity [... and] generate more Membership sales."

Genius idea, I say. Genius.

I've already written a bit about our recent trip to the museum (here, here, and here), but I have about six pages of notes (and one sketch) that I'd like to post, too -- mostly painting titles and artists; pieces that inspired and/or interested us. I'll cobble that together between studies, music lessons, art projects, and swim practices in the coming week.

Until then, the "Fine Art Friday" archive can be found here.

Where books come to life

Master M-mv sent me the link to this video, which takes as its inspiration Maurice Gee's 1993 novel, Going West. We read Gee's 1995 novel, The Fat Man, more than a decade ago. [Insert sighing observation about time-flies and starfish hands and letting go.]

The blind bow-boy's butt-shaft

If you read this entry, you already know how pleased I was that the Misses readily recognized Bartolomeo Manfredi's Cupid Chastened.

Yesterday Mercutio also spoke to us about the son of Venus:

Romeo and Juliet, Act Two, Scene IV:

Alas poor Romeo! he is already dead; stabbed with a white wench's black eye; shot through the ear with a love-song; the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt-shaft: and is he a man to encounter Tybalt?

As I mentioned in that same entry, the Manfredi is currently hung in Gallery 211, with Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus. Well, near the end of the first episode of "Ways of Seeing," John Berger uses Supper to make a point about the way children respond to art.

As it happens, I just began watching this series. While at the Art Institute, I made a note in my sketchbook to acquire a copy of Cynthia Freeland's introduction to art theory, But Is It Art? The book is featured in the Modern Wing gift shop, and while it looked promising, I was loath to pay full price. When I began poking around for purchase options Sunday night, I was reminded of Berger's text, Ways of Seeing, which reminder led me to see if the program had ever been released on DVD. (Alas, it hasn't.) This search, finally, led me to an online resource. (Links below.)

And there you have it.

Synchronicity. Synthesis. Serendipity.

Again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.


"Ways of Seeing," Episode One
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

Sandhill cranes

On Friday, we were able to sleep in a bit. But at 8:30 a.m., I heard what sounded eerily like women shouting. Only that wasn't quite it. I called out to Mr. M-mv, who was padding about in the kitchen.

"Can you hear that?"

"Nope. What?"

Story of our lives. Heh, heh, heh.

Two mugs of coffee, seventy-five pages, and a dozen read email messages later, I heard it again. "Can you --?" I began, but Miss M-mv(i) also spoke. "Sandhill cranes. Can you hear them?"

They sounded so loud. And nearly an hour had passed. What was going on?

Turns out the cranes had chosen the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie as their meeting place. Hundreds and hundreds of the birds circled and swooped above us as they met and then embarked on their migration.

Simply. Amazing.

From National Geographic:

Sandhills are the most common of all the world's cranes. A fossil from the Miocene Epoch, some ten million years ago, was found to be structurally the same as the modern sandhill crane. Today, these large birds are found predominately in North America. They range south to Mexico and Cuba, and as far west as Siberia.

Migratory subspecies of sandhill cranes breed in the Northern U.S., Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. Each winter they undertake long southern journeys to wintering grounds in Florida, Texas, Utah, Mexico, and California. En route, more than three-fourths of all sandhill cranes use migratory staging areas in a single 75-mile (120-kilometer) stretch along Nebraska's Platte River.