Sometimes I have to remember this because we need space to air out our brains and just take in the world. I find this space sometimes when I take a long walk with my dog.
Vonnegut tells about going out to buy an envelope when he wanted to mail something. Here’s a version from a PBS interview:
DAVID BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a
very intense book– your latest– in which you're heading out the door and
your wife says what are you doing? I think you say– I'm getting– I'm
going to buy an envelope.
KURT VONNEGUT: Yeah.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
KURT VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you're not a poor man. You know, why
don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the
closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope
because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying
one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking
babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And,
and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The
moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of
course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer
people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You
know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all
anymore.
There's a loud relentless barking of a dog. He's inside a 2nd floor apartment on the corner. The windows are open and the sound reverberates halfway down the block. I was certain there was a dog chained up outside.
The rain is turning us all into mushrooms. While walking Romeo dog, I was determined to return my book at the library and get another. My book was protected in a plastic bag. I wore my bright yellow rubber boots and lavender fleece hat but my sweatshirt and jeans got soaked. Romeo got soaked too.
I spotted two homeless guys crouched in two different empty abandoned storefronts sheltering from the rain. Where can the homeless go? The men's shelter is not open until November.
Romeo loves the rub down with a dry towel and now he's glossy and as soft as cashmere.
“I am so afraid of people's words.They describe so distinctly everything: And this they call dog and that they call house, here the start and there the end. I worry about their mockery with words, they know everything, what will be, what was; no mountain is still miraculous; and their house and yard lead right up to God. I want to warn and object: Let the things be! I enjoy listening to the sound they are making. But you always touch: and they hush and stand still. That's how you kill.”
My toe felt something wet. I moved my foot around. More wet. I turned on the light, 12:34 AM. My dog had vomited on the bed and had eaten it back up. He did not look happy. "It's okay baby," I said. I put on my pants and sweatshirt and followed him downstairs. He immediately ran onto the grass and squatted, twice. When he was done he was so happy he did a happy dog dance before bounding back up the stairs. I put a small dish towel over the wet spot and tried to fall back to sleep. It took a while.
This morning I had a routine blood test scheduled and I was so distracted by my hunger after fasting for over 12 hours. I drank water and tried to proceed with my morning, writing and having a shower. I was running out of steam. They open at 8. I hoofed it over to the lab only 5 blocks away and took a number. While waiting I read a picture book about Celia Cruz, a Cuban singer.
The phlebotomist was a young man with black hair who was very serious. I knew not to look as he filled three test tubes. My stomach growled. My neighbor Joel showed up for a blood test too and was in the next stall. We said hello. I was relieved to be able to go home and have breakfast, a banana, coffee, and toast.
Then I walked Romeo downtown and saw about 20 seniors in the park doing exercises on the basketball court with long green and blue elastics. They looked like slow-moving square dancers without music. On my way back I could see East School Street was blocked off. There were two fire engines and four police cars. Apparently a man's black SUV had caught fire while he was driving. He pulled over and got out in time. I'm glad nobody was hurt.
Colson Whitehead, novelist and indefatigable New York walker, said of his peregrinations.
“Walking
in New York is very much a solo pursuit for me,” he told me. “But I
never feel alone because I have company — I’m walking with, not through,
the City.”*
I made a leek and potato soup
the day after, prompted by the look
of the peeled potato going soft
in a glass of water by the sink.
Beyond the back door, drizzle
and the raw morning air argued for soup,
added their weight to the nod of the knife
slicing the leeks, wrapped up in themselves,
into logs, into rings – whites, yellows and greens –
that I agitated till they came clean
in a bowl of cold water and set
simmering with the potato in stock
I'd thickened with flour, sprinkled with dried
herbs – rosemary, thyme – and startled
with a splash of leftover wine.
We had it for lunch, liquidised
with the top of the milk and heated through
and though I dare say you didn't notice
the taste, you ate it. It's sometimes too soon
to speak about things, but you've got to eat.
the moments
where nothing happens.
The moments
that fill our lives.
Not the field bright with poppies, but
the times you walked, seeing
no leaves, no sky, only one foot
after another.
We are sleeping
(it’s not midnight and
there is no dream).
We enter a room – no one is in it.
We run a tap,
queue to buy a stamp.
These are the straw moments
that give substance
to our astonishments;
moments the homesick dream of;
the bereaved, the diagnosed.
When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone is telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply.
If they say We should get together say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store nod briefly and become a cabbage. When someone you haven’t seen in ten years appears at the door, don’t start singing him all your new songs. You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.
Pancakes symbolize family love. My step-father used to
pour the batter into animal shapes on Saturday mornings when we were small until my jealous mother put a stop
to it. The kitchen was HER domain.
In the book I
just read, Blackbird, by Jennifer Lauck, the folk tale Snow White recurred and
soothed her through all of her childhood trials.
Rapunzel, Snow White, and Cinderella were compelling stories for me as a child. We had recordings of them (on vinyl!) and I would play them over and over. I loved the poison combs and poisoned apples. It all made perfect sense to me, encoded messages and warnings about the jealous siblings and adults.
In college I took a course about folk tales. As an adult I have a number of collections. I still can't get enough of them. I have discovered that folktales are TRUE!!
Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration. How do you think Capote came to “In Cold Blood”? It was just an ordinary day when he picked up the paper to read his horoscope, and there it was — fate. Whether it’s a harrowing account of a multiple homicide, a botched Everest expedition or a colorful family of singers trying to escape from Austria when the Nazis invade, you can’t force it. Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, “Only you understand me.” Your ideal subject should be like a stalker with limitless resources, living off the inheritance he received after the suspiciously sudden death of his father. He’s in your apartment pawing your stuff when you’re not around, using your toothbrush and cutting out all the really good synonyms from the thesaurus. Don’t be afraid: you have a best seller on your hands.
State scrambles to secure Rhode Island’s Independent Man statue atop State House in advance of Hurricane Lee
A drone video revealed a gap in the marble base that
supports the 11-foot-tall, 500-pound statue, which will have to be taken
down from atop the State House for repairs
By Edward Fitzpatrick Globe Staff,Updated September 15, 2023, 30 minutes ago
The pedestal that holds up Rhode Island's Independent Man statue has split
The
Independent Man and the cupola atop the Rhode Island State House dome
will undergo an important, historic repair and preservation effort.
PROVIDENCE
— For the first time since 1975 and only the second time in history,
the Independent Man statue will come down from atop the Rhode Island
State House, state officials announced Friday.
Earlier
this week, a drone scanning the State House dome as part of a façade
cleaning project spotted a gap in the base beneath the 11-foot-tall,
500-pound golf-leaf statue.
With Hurricane Lee
approaching the area, state officials are scrambling to secure the
statue before the strong winds arrive. A massive crane stood outside the
State House on Friday, and work crews were planning to secure the
statue and its base.
During
a news conference across the street from the State House, Governor
Daniel J. McKee said he is grateful that the drone video revealed the
separation in the base beneath the statue.
“This
allowed us to act quickly to safeguard this important piece of Rhode
Island history and address any damage to the statue’s marble base before
it could become a safety issue,” he said. “The Independent Man is an
iconic symbol of our state and a source of pride for all Rhode
Islanders, reminding us of the spirit of independence that our state was
founded on.”
After
the initial work to secure the statue is complete, and the full plan
for the restoration and preservation is finalized, the Independent Man
will be temporarily removed from atop the State House dome,
administration officials said. The administration will be developing
options to display the statute for the general public to enjoy before it
is reunited to its base atop the State House.
“The
Independent Man has weathered decades of storms and blizzards and
hurricanes, and now he will be restored to pristine condition to be
enjoyed for generations to come and for people across the nation and the
world to come and see,” McKee said.
McKee
said the drone detected the separation in the marble base beneath the
statue as crews were preparing to clean the dome and the area
surrounding the Independent Man.
Drone video recently
revealed a large separation in the marble base beneath the bronze
Independent Man statue atop the Rhode Island State House. RI Department of Administration
He
noted that he asked the General Assembly to fund the cleaning of the
entire Georgian marble surface of the 125-year-old State House. The
$2.24 million cleaning project is being funded by the Rhode Island
Capital funded Asset Protection Program.
The
bronze statue, originally named “Hope,” was designed by George
Brewster, cast by the Gorham Manufacturing Company of Providence, and
installed in 1899. It has come down from the dome just once, in 1975,
for repairs and a new coat of gold leaf.
Jonathan
Womer, director of the Department of Administration, said a drone flew
over the State House and grounds on Tuesday to assess how the cleaning
project was progressing.
“It
became very apparent that there was some serious damage to the cupola —
the dome that the Independent Man is sitting on,” he said. “A very
large separation between two of the segments. We realized this was very,
very troubling, especially with the possibility of inclement weather
coming our way.”
Womer
said the last time the Independent Man came down, the restoration
process lasted about a year. “I’d expect something very similar this
time around,” he said.
A Red-tailed Hawk in
pursuit of prey next to the "Independent Man" statue on the top of the
Rhode Island State House dome in Providence.David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
Marco
Schiappa, director of the Division of Capital Asset Management and
Maintenance, said the crane was lifting workers in a basket on Friday so
they can strap the statue around the cupola and secure it. The crews
will also strap down “loose stones that are up there right now that are
dislodged to prevent them from moving any further,” he said. “It’s a
temporary action just to ensure things are safe.”
Schiappa said officials believe that the repairs needed on the cupola will require the statue to come down from the building.
Womer
said he did not know how much work will cost yet. “We do have a number
of capital accounts with the State House we can look at,” he said. “In
addition, we are doing an insurance assessment because this really does
seem like it was an event that happened, rather than slow progress.”
Drone
footage from January, when the cleaning project began, showed no damage
at that time, Womer said. “There have been a lot of weather event this
summer,” he said. “Probably one of them contributed to this. Exactly
which we are going to have to assess.”
McKee said it’s not clear yet when the statue will come down or where it would be kept then.
“We
will have a plan,” he said. “We will make sure the people of the state
of Rhode Island are able to see front and center what it looks like and
share in their pride. We will take advantage of an opportunity like this
to kind of share Rhode Island’s history with the people.”
The pedestal that holds up Rhode Island's Independent Man statue has split
The
Independent Man and the cupola atop the Rhode Island State House dome
will undergo an important, historic repair and preservation effort.
Fernando
Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous pictures and sculptures of
overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other
products of his whimsical imagination made him one of the world’s
best-known artists, died on Friday in Monaco. He was 91.
His
death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a close friend, Mauricio
Vallejo, a co-owner of an art gallery in Houston, who said the cause was
complications of pneumonia. President Gustavo Petro of Colombia earlier
announced the death on social media.
As
a young artist, Mr. Botero developed an instantly recognizable style
and enjoyed great and immediate commercial success. Fans sought his
autograph and were known to wait for him at airports.
“‘It’s
the profession you do if you wish to die of hunger,’ people used to
tell me,” he once recalled. “Yet I was so strongly impelled to take it
up that I never thought about the consequences.”
Mr.
Botero was permanently associated with the florid, rounded figures that
filled his pictures. He portrayed middle-class life and bordellos,
clerics and peasants, bulging baskets of fruit and the grim effects of
violence.
Fernando Botero Angulo was
born on April 19, 1932, in the Colombian city of Medellín. His father
died when he was a child. An uncle enrolled him in a Jesuit high school,
encouraged his artistic interests and supported him for two years as he
studied to be a matador. Bullfighting scenes figure in some of his
earliest work, and he followed bullfighting all his life.
Image
Mr.
Botero in 2003. “‘I was so strongly impelled to take it up,” he said of
his career as an artist, “that I never thought about the consequences.”Credit...Getty Images
After
publishing an article titled “Pablo Picasso and Nonconformity in Art,”
Mr. Botero was expelled from his Jesuit school because it expressed
ideas said to be “irreligious.” Among his early influences were Cubism,
Mexican murals and the pinup art of Alberto Vargas, whose “Vargas girl”
drawings he saw in Esquire magazine.
He
began publishing illustrations in a local newspaper while still a
teenager, worked as a set designer and in 1951 moved to Bogotá, the
capital. After his first one-man show there, he moved to Paris and spent
several years living there and in Florence, Italy.
In 1961, the New York curator Dorothy Miller bought a Botero work, “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve,”
for the Museum of Modern Art. It was a surprising choice, since
Abstract Expressionism was then the rage, and Mr. Botero’s sketchy
portrait of a chubby-cheeked child seemed out of place. It was placed on
exhibit while the original Mona Lisa was being shown uptown, at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The
Modern’s attention to his work helped set Mr. Botero on a path to
renown. In 1979, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Hirschhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington. Many of his pictures were of
corpulent figures poised between caricature and pathos.
“A
perfect woman in art can prove banal in reality, like a photograph in
Playboy,” Mr. Botero reasoned. “The most beautiful women in art, like
Mona Lisa herself, were ugly in real life. There are those who see the
monstrous in my work, but my work is what it is.”
One
review of the Hirschhorn show was headlined “Botero, One Hundred
Thousand Dollars for a Painting by Him in Washington.” That reflected
the view of some critics that Mr. Botero’s work was banal,
self-referential and out of touch with vibrant currents in contemporary
art.
“The critics have always written with rage and fury about me, all my life,” Mr. Botero groused.
Writing in The London Evening Standard in 2009, the arts writer Godfrey Barker marveled, “Wow, do they loathe him.”
“The
high priests of contemporary art in London and New York cannot stand
him because he defies everything they believe in,” Mr. Barker wrote.
“They hate him more because he is rich, an immense commercial success,
easy on the eye, and very popular with ordinary folk.”
Mr.
Botero and his first wife, Gloria Zea, who became Colombia’s minister
of culture, divorced in 1960 after having three children: Fernando,
Lina, and Juan Carlos. He spent much of the next decade and a half
living in New York. Ms. Zea died in 2019. He was married two other times, to Cecilia Zambrano and, in 1978, to Sophia Vari, a Greek painter and sculptor. Ms. Vari died in May.
He is survived by his three children from his first marriage as well as a brother, Rodrigo, and grandchildren.
Two
misfortunes marked Mr. Botero’s family life. In the 1970s, his
5-year-old son, Pedro, from his second marriage, was killed in a car
crash in which Mr. Botero was injured. His son Fernando Botero Zea, who
had become a politician in Colombia and rose to minister of defense,
served 30 months in prison after being convicted in a corruption
scandal.
It was during the 1970s that
Mr. Botero’s interest in form led him to sculpture. His sculptures, many
depicting florid, whimsical large people, brought him a new level of
public visibility. Major cities clamored to place them along main
avenues, including, in New York, in the median strips of Park Avenue
in 1993. Several are on permanent display in nontraditional spaces
ranging from the lobby of the Deutsche Bank Center (formerly the Time
Warner Center) in New York to a lounge at the Grand Wailea resort in
Hawaii called the Botero Bar.
Mr. Botero’s sculpture “Eve” was installed in the lobby of what was then the Time Warner Center in Manhattan in 2013. Credit...Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
Mr.
Botero was an enthusiastic art collector, and in 2000 he donated part
of his collection to a museum in his hometown, Medellín. Some of his
works are interpretations of masterpieces by artists like Caravaggio,
Titian and van Gogh.
Mr.
Botero usually depicted his men of power with at least a touch of irony
or satire. Yet, although they may appear foppish or self-important, and
nearly all are of exaggerated proportion, he infused them with a
measure of dignity.
Jesus was Mr.
Botero’s subject in several evocative works. He painted portraits of
Delacroix, Ingres and Giacometti. His images of authority, like
“Cardinal,” “The English Ambassador,” “The First Lady” and two called
“The President,” painted in 1987 and 1989, are gently sympathetic. He
brought portly dignity to a man who smoked and a woman who stroked a
cat.
Many of his subjects, though,
were swollen tapestries of flesh, bursting from the confines of
uniforms, dresses and towels unable to cover exaggerated acreage. He
insisted that he never painted fat people, saying he wished simply to
glorify the sensuality of life.
“I
studied the art of Giotto and all other Italian masters,” he once said.
“I was fascinated by their sense of volume and monumentality. Of course
in modern art everything is exaggerated, so my voluminous figures also
became exaggerated.”
Mr. Botero and
Ms. Vari maintained homes in Paris and Pietrasanta, Italy, where an
exhibition was held to mark his 80th birthday in 2012.
Some
who considered Mr. Botero’s art to be essentially playful and
lighthearted were surprised when, in 2005, he produced a series of
graphic paintings based on photographs of prisoners abused at the American jail in Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
“These
works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq
produced in me and the rest of the world,” Mr. Botero said of his
paintings depicting prisoners being abused at the American jail in Abu
Ghraib.Credit...Simon Corral/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“These works are the result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world,” he said.
The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote
that the Abu Ghraib paintings “restore the prisoners’ dignity and
humanity without diminishing their agony or the injustice of their
situation.” The novelist and critic Erica Jong called them “astonishing”
and asserted that they argued for “a complete revision of whatever we
previously thought of Botero’s work.”
“When
we think about the Colombian artist Fernando Botero, most of us
visualize his roly-poly people flaunting their fat, their fashionable
headgear, their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their excess,” Ms.
Jong wrote. “I never thought of these as political images until I saw
Botero’s Abu Ghraib series." Now, she added, “I see all Botero’s work as
a record of the brutality of the haves against the have-nots.”
Mr.
Botero had dealt with political themes before, notably the Colombian
drug trade, but he always returned to more calming projects afterward.
Following the Abu Ghraib series, he produced a series of circus pictures
and then rediscovered his longtime love of still life.
“After all this time,” he said in 2010, “I always return to the simplest things.”
