Accommodatingly

Upcoming gigs and new writings online by us: I’m in the new Believer on Noah Eli Gordon, whose book with a fiddle in its title I liked a lot; at Harriet, I recommend a Romany poet (not Roman; Romany). I’m also going to be at the Wallace Stevens society session next Saturday afternoon at the Modern Language Ass’n Big Thing in Chicago, the first time I’ve been to the MLA in eight years in which I was neither seeking a job, nor interviewing job-seekers for Macalester. I’ll be talking about Connecticut in Stevens’ late poems. And speaking of Macalester, the Scots are finally winning some women’s hoops games. You had to wait till after we left, didn’t you?

All this is by way of ground-clearing so I can talk about what’s really fascinating this minute: Nathan’s new set of arts-related behaviors. This afternoon he woke up from his nap and told me he had “a dream, with letters– C and D.” Whenever we look at pictures, or at picture books (e.g. Frog and Toad, a set of kids playing basketball) he tells us that one of the bigger people or creatures is the littlest one’s mommy (or, usually on a second try, his daddy).

He’s long been able to recognize himself in photographs, but now he looks at photographs of himself from 2006 and says “That’s Nathan– little.” This morning he named his stuffed orangutan: the orangutan’s name, we now know, is “Owie.”

And most recently– that is, say, two hours ago– he made up his first song: given an out-of-tune guitar to play with (he’ll be getting a sturdy toy banjo for Xmas, but he doesn’t know that yet: this was a closely supervised real guitar) and about twenty minutes to touch the strings, he came up with a song called “My Tuba.”

He knows it’s his song, too– he’ll sing it again if you ask (while playing guitar). Here are the lyrics: “My tuba, my tuba, my tuba, my tuba, Mommy tuba, Daddy tuba, Nathan tuba, my tuba.” Elvis Costello had better watch his back.

For about the past week Nathan’s favorite activity, by a large margin, has been the making of visual art. He wants to go into his playroom to draw with crayons when he gets up, he had trouble leaving school yesterday when it was time to go home because he wanted to do more work on a picture at his easel (where the kids have taped-up paper on which to draw), and when we got home, he headed for his playroom to draw some more. He’s sometimes fascinated by the abstract-ish patterns he can make with monochromes (”circle!” he says) or with combinations of crayons, but he’s also figuring out how to make patterns that look (at least to him) like attempts to represent objects in the visible world.

In fact, he’s so intent on making such representations, and so exacting about them, that he’s asking us to draw them and then telling us when our drawings fall short: this morning he was happy to have Jessie draw, and then happy to have me draw, heart shapes, but yesterday evening he got very frustrated when he asked me to draw his “chapeau-hat” (a kind of round hat Jessie used to wear, which Nathan now wears, and which his Uncle Andrew, who lives in Montreal, has named) and my crayon drawings didn’t look enough like the hat to please him. Jessie saved the day by drawing a batting helmet, which (we explained to Nathan) was what Manny and Big Papi wear.

Nathan also has ideas of abstract art that come in part from the bit of Jackson Pollock in the first Olivia book, in which Olivia sees a Pollock at a museum and then comes home and tries to reproduce it on the wall, the result being not a Pollock but a mess: “Jackson Pollock” and “mess” are Nathan’s favored terms for big scribbles. It turns out there’s a Pollock at the Fogg. We’ll have to take him there quite soon.

Not today, though. I do think that Nathan can expect (if not today, then sometime before night eight) another art-making tool or two for Hannukah.

New writing elsewhere from us (not related to children’s art): Jessie herself writes for the Beacon Broadside today, on injustice at Guantanamo; I apply anti-rust treatment to an early poem by Donald Revell. (Also, I don’t think I ever mentioned in this space the flatteringly attentive review I got from a Minnesota writer named Stan Sanvel Rubin last year: I think it’s the most, and maybe the best, in-print attention my poetry has ever received.) Happy Hannukah!

This time, they’re art: Monday we saw an exhibit of (on? for? about?) Joseph Cornell. We journeyed to the traveling show in Salem with J and (unexpectedly) C and her friend from Brooklyn, A. We, um, like him. (We like J, and C, and A, as well.)

More here. Why don’t they sell posters?

Today– after two weeks!– we’re finally going to be able to watch television. Or, as I sometimes think of it, watch television. I plan– in all seriousness– to learn a bit more about how to lecture effectively as we, on occasion, watch television.

Bunch of new poetry-related projects: watch this space for updates as confirmations, contracts, denials, and such-like come in.

Rain Taxi, my work home and a fantastic mag with which I’m sure many of you are familiar, is holding a benefit auction on eBay. Great items including books and comics autographed by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, many cool poetry broadsides and chapbooks, original art and photography, handmade items, and a book on the history of the bathroom. Find out more at www.raintaxi.com!

shiny legume

Originally uploaded by Jessie and Steve.

Chicago’s Millenium Park–Cloud Gate sculpture.

This photo has the following distortionate effect:

1. My boobs look even bigger
2. My legs look even shorter
3. Nathan looks much tinier than he is.

Different perspectives on the sculpture here and here.

The Tate Modern is doing an Henri Rousseau blockbuster.

When I was a teen, I first visited the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. I gasped at all the familiar works that I had adored in the big, fat art books at school and went nuts over in my Art History classes. But when I came around the corner and saw The Sleeping Gypsy, I was stopped dead in my tracks and tears came to my eyes. It was the first time (and still only one of a handful of times) a work of visual art affected me on such a deep emotional level.

The only other time I was brought to tears at the altar of art was in St. Peter’s in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, which left me shedding tears for a half an hour while walking through the cathedral, and every time I so much as glanced at it afterwards. This from an avowed atheist and someone who finds the wretched excess of the Catholic church (not to mention its attitudes toward women and gays) somewhat vile.