the cassandra pages

NYC in January

 

 

 

A personal methodology...

Between January 8 and 16th, my husband and I were in New York for a week of visiting friends, going to museums, walking a lot, and hanging out in one of our favorite cities in the world. To save on hotel bills, we’ve often stayed in Brooklyn or even across the river in New Jersey, and sometimes we’ve stayed with friends, but the last several times we’ve rented hotel rooms in Manhattan, and really enjoyed it. The thing is, you have to go when the prices are low — which means the dead of winter, after the holidays, or at other low-peak times of the year.

 

The view from our window.

This time we were in the Flatiron District, on 26th between Broadway and Sixth -- a good location for transport, services, and walking easily to both lower Manhattan and midtown. While the streets were cold and windy, it was nothing like the temperatures or weather we’ve had in Montreal, so it felt like a break for us. A couple of days even got up into the 40s! We had a room in a high-tech hotel with little staff, where you do everything with your phone. It had a kitchenette with a fridge and microwave, so we were able to prepare our own breakfast and make sandwiches or simple dinners when we weren’t planning to eat out. We easily made up the extra price for those amenities by not spending as much in restaurants. Even slices of pizza, that staple food of New York, have gone up a lot in price!

 

Sketching in bed.

I thought I’d share some notes on packing, in case any of these ideas are useful. We had traveled (by car to Albany, then by train, but it would be the same by air) as we always do, with just carry-on bags and a tote bag (for me) and camera bag (for him). Winter travel requires more thought and potential weight than going in warm weather. Over the years I’ve developed a simple formula for my clothes, making sure to wear the heaviest things on the plane or train. For this January trip, that included just two pairs of pants, no skirts: for me that’s one pair of jeans and a pair of slim black washable slacks. Several washable/dryable layers for tops (I like Uniqlo Heattech camisoles and turtlenecks in two weights and neutral colors), a light nightshirt and a small quantity of easily-washable underwear and socks, plus a pair of cotton-blend tights to layer for cold days; a black fleece zip-neck sweater, two cashmere sweaters (dark blue and greyish-purple), and a dressier black turtleneck sweater.

For this trip I took two scarves: one a bright wool-blend jacquard, the other an abstract silk print. All the clothes go into my rolling suitcase in zippered packing cubes, which then keep everything organized in the hotel’s dresser drawers or shelves. Outerwear is an ultra-lightweight down jacket layer, and a high-quality rain shell with hood, a knitted hat and gloves. A couple of pairs of my vintage silver Mexican earrings and one necklace, plus a pair of gold hoops, are the only jewelry I take. This time I wore my low hiking shoes (Merrell) most of the time, and packed a pair of medium-weight black leather ankle boots for dressier occasions. I take my phone and a small tablet that has a keyboard, and scrupulously avoid taking or buying books. The rest of the weight is taken up with toiletries and medication, in the tiniest packages I can manage. I empty, flatten, and pack my cross-body Baggallini purse in the suitcase, and during travel keep all my essentials (wallet, passport, small sketchbook and watercolor palette, etc) in my carry-on tote, which fits over the handle of the rolling suitcase. Not having to lug or pull heavy bags makes a big difference in how much I enjoy travelling, so I’m completely sold on this method.

We generally walk or take the subway (we love the NY subway) and don’t use cabs, but obviously that requires pretty good mobility and some knowledge of the system. This time we called an Uber only to take us from the hotel to Penn Station/Amtrak when we were leaving the city to go home, but it arrived almost immediately.

 

On the subway.

I’ll write more about what we did in a subsequent post. It was a great trip!

Books of 2024

Time for another year's book list - how can we be here already? It was another year of long reads, book-ended by Don Quixote in the first part of the year, and The Magic Mountain this past fall, both read with my book group.

I did a deep dive into two renowned poets, reading the complete works of Louise Glück, and much of W.S. Merwin, and read a number of short stories as well as other novels. Of these, I was especially struck by the power of Ernest Hemingway's short fiction, most of which I'd read long ago; by Thomas Mann's short stories; and by "The Pole" by J. M. Coetzee.

At the end of 2024, what remains most vividly in my reader's mind? The Magic Mountain, without a doubt. This was my second time reading the book, and -- fittingly perhaps -- happened while I was recovering from COVID. As I wrote in a blog post earlier, "Mann’s book shows us human beings as primarily short-sighted and self-interested, drawn to the pursuit of pleasure and superficialities, and prone to ignoring and forgetting the lessons of recent experience — but also looks at other possibilities of how to live one’s life." My understanding of this book, surely one of the greatest novels ever written, was enhanced by Colm Toíbín's fictionalized biography of Mann, The Magician. By contrast, I found Don Quixote repetitive and tedious, and I'd be hard put to recommend it to anyone! 

I've never particularly liked Mark Twain, which is probably why I'd never read Huckleberry Finn before. It's certainly a seminal book of American fiction, but reading it in 2025, one can't help but be put off by the language and stereotyping of "Negroes", even though it was typical of that time. Reading it now is shocking, and disturbed me because -- even as expressed by sympathetic anti-slavery whites like Twain -- these superior and, yes, racist attitudes have persisted down to today in much of American society. Unfortunately, we saw that played out as a major factor in the 2024 election. James, a retelling of Twain's book from the point of view of the runaway slave, Jim, is a contemporary corrective, and worth reading.

On the other hand, Kukum, by Michel Jean, is a fictionalized account of the life of the author's grandmother, a French Canadian woman who married an indigenous man and went to live a nomadic life with the Pekuakami Innu community in the Canadian woods. Her life with him spanned the era of the residential schools and the coming of lumber and paper companies to the north, who appropriated the land and destroyed huge swaths of territory that had been sacred to the native peoples. The writing is simple and unremarkable, but the story is compelling. I think every Canadian should read this book.

In the "good reads" category, I enjoyed Abraham Vergese's The Covenant of Water, Zadie Smith's The Fraud, and Marianne Wiggins' The Properties of Thirst, all of which taught me about particular places and periods of history, but I doubt any of them will last as major works of literature. 

The most creative book I encountered last year was Teju Cole's Pharmakon, a work of photographs and short fictional texts that pushes the boundaries of both "photobook" and fiction. Pharmakon (a Greek word that means both "cure" and "poison") uses images and visceral texts to evoke displacement, absence, and violence in response to the world in which we find ourselves, and from which so many human beings cannot escape or find refuge. It is also one of the most beautifully-designed and produced books I've ever seen (from MACK).

I'm also happy to recommend The Picture Not Taken, by my friend, the photographer and writer Benjamin Swett and published by New York Review Books. Photography is sometimes the specific subject, but more often an entry-point for these deeply-thoughtful essays about family relationships, creativity, and self.

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Reading is a way to understand my own humanity through the experience of others, all the way to the beginning of writing. It's a solitary pursuit, but I love talking about books with fellow readers, and am immensely grateful for my book group friends and our weekly discussions, as well as other literary-minded friends in my life.

My choices of books have become more deliberate as I've gotten older, because setting priorities feels ever more important. I'm a fast reader, but even so, I don't read primarily for "escape" or entertainment, but to learn and think, and to absorb exceptional craft in writing and literary conception which I hope make my own efforts better. I can see why I often prefer to read older books, trying to fill in the gaps in my reading history rather than picking up whatever is new and getting a buzz, and I've also found it very rewarding to deeply immerse myself in a particular author's entire work. But the new and experimental also appeals to me - it's just becoming more rare. I do think the highly competitive, financially-driven publishing atmosphere, as well the extreme influence of the media, tend to push many authors toward what will sell and generate "buzz". It's a loss for us, and, frankly, a loss for the writers as well.

What did you read this year? What stayed with you? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

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Book List, 2024

The Pole and other stories, J.M. Coetzee

The Picture Not Taken, Benjamin Swett (essays)

The Properties of Thirst, Marianne Wiggins #

The Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway (selections)

The Complete Poems, Louise Glück

Human Acts, Han Kang (in progress)

Death in Venice and Other Stories, Thomas Mann

La pentre de batailles, Arturo Perez-Riverte (translated from Spanish to French)

The Essential W.S. Merwin, W.S. Merwin

Kukum, Michel Jean

The Magic Mountain, Thoman Mann #

The Magician, Colm Toíbín

James, Percival Everett #

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain #

This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud (DNF)

The Covenant of Water, Abraham Vergese # 

Don Quixote, Cervantes #

Pharmakon, Teju Cole

Violets, Kyung Sook Shin  MY REVIEW in CHA: an Asian Literary Journal

The Fraud, Zadie Smith #

Why Christianity Must Change or Die, John Shelby Spong

Once in Europa, John Berger # 

The Abyss, Marguerite Yourcenar

# indicates a book read with my book group.

Winter Solstice

 

The last pale light of the shortest day of the year came barely through the mid-afternoon today. In the summer, the sun sets beyond the right edge of this picture. I’ll be glad to see it begin its course back in the other direction.

Here in the north, we feel these short days in our bodies as well as in our spirits. The brightness of the holidays pushes us through December, but it’s January and early February that are the hardest for those who are most affected by the lack of sunlight. I am not, particularly, but we’ll be leaving our tree and star up for several weeks, grateful for their beauty and sparkle in the dim, short afternoons and dark evenings.

Lately I’ve been buoyed by music: the cathedral’s joyful Sing-along Messiah last weekend; a wonderful recital by my close friend Catherine St-Arnaud and the pianist Julien LeBlanc at a Montreal gallery yesterday evening; and watching a live performance by the Berlin Philharmonic this afternoon, on their Digital Concert Hall platform, of Mozart’s D-minor piano concerto and Bruckner’s 9th symphony, conducted by the astonishing Herbert Blomstedt, who is 96 years old.

Today was also a day of baking, package-wrapping, and conversing with friends.

Wherever you are, I wish you a happy solstice and safe passage through this darkest time of the year.

Happy 100, Dad - You Almost Made It!

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A few days after my mother died, a month shy of her 83rd birthday, my father and I were raking the front lawn in preparation for the gathering after her funeral. He stood up straight, leaned on his rake, and said, “Your mother accepted that she was going to die. She said she’d had a good life, and it was fine.”

I waited, certain he was going to say more. Our eyes met.

“I don’t feel that way at all!” he exclaimed. “I want to live to be 100!”

 

My parents, late 1940s.

At the time he was 82, and although neither of us knew it, he would have 15 more years of life -- most of it in remarkably good health— before dying at 97, several months after his second partner. I wish he had made it to 100, but how fortunate he was to have so many good years late in life.

 

My father and his second partner, Barbara, around 2022.

I know exactly what he attributed his good health to: exercise. After quitting smoking in the late 1050s, a habit acquired during his service in Europe in WWII, he became obsessed with physical fitness. He’d always been a good athlete, particularly as a baseball player and runner, and was one of the first people to take up jogging in our small town. He kept running until his knees simply wouldn’t let him. Every morning he did the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises - and kept that up until a year or so before he died. His other sport was table tennis, which he practiced incessantly, playing any challenger, and having a regular weekly game with a series of well-matched players. He competed regionally, at the state level, and many times in the national Senior Games, where he won first place in his age class, one of the years when he was over 90. He denied being competitive, but that claim was disingenuous - he never let me win at anything, even when I was little! I do agree that his drive was less about winning than about continual self-improvement. It could be difficult to be around someone like that, but I also admired it.

 

Dad and me, early 1970s

He ate a lot of sugar, red meat, and had a cocktail every night, but stayed thin, and never took statins or blood pressure medications. Maybe when you exercise as much as he did, both in an athletic sense, and in building and taking care of a house and property, it mitigates the effects of diet. Certainly he had a high metabolism! On the other hand, we’ve also had people in our families who never exercised, were overweight, and took plenty of medication, and also lived well into their 90s. I think my father was lucky in his genetic makeup, courageous and strong in spirit, as well as having two women who loved him and many friends through his life. The greatest challenge he faced was surviving the war — and he had several very close calls. After that, I think he was determined to build a life and live it fully — and he did. I will always miss him, and be grateful for the qualities we shared and the things he taught me.

 

Subscribed

Revisiting Old Journals - 1997

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Recently a friend and I have been discussing writers’ and artists’ journals and diaries. It prompted me to go back and read some of my own, since I’ve kept a journal of sorts through most of my life. Here are some excerpts from two months in 1997. I was 45 at the time and living in Vermont. The pencil drawing above was done today.

February 1997

A comforting thought: when I DO read someone else’s journal, esp. Merton’s, I can see that they too struggle with the whole notion of ego as it is embodied in the particular form that is journal-writing. He gets disgusted just as I do, threatens to (and did, apparently) tear out pages and throw them away, finds, at times, the whole thing embarrassing and trivial and poorly written and full of sniveling navel-staring. Yet for some reason we keep on, I think more than anything because it allows this particular type of person to organize their thoughts. I used to think that I would use the journal as the basis for other writings. I don’t know if that will ever be the case — this may be it. And possibly no one will ever think it is interesting enough to read it through. But to say it is written solely for my own eyes is deceptive. It IS intended to be read, and although I try to be as free as I can in what I express, there is always the sense that I will not be able to edit it myself; that someday it will exist as a record of me. It’s an interesting scenario, and one that I might as well ignore and just get on with the writing.

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September 1997

On Labor Day we finally woke up to a day free from obligations, which we could spend reading the Sunday Times (Lady Di had just died in Paris), making some nice food, going to a movie (“Air Force One,” at the Town Hall Theater in Woodstock).

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Someday someone will write about e-mail being the death of letters, if they haven’t already, but will they also write about it as the death of journals? I have pages and pages of e-mail correspondence from this year, but the idea of collecting it, organizing it, putting it into Word files, and printing it makes me faint with fatigue. But I am sad at the thought of losing a whole year’s worth of thoughts and reflections. I find myself wondering if the form itself, though, breeds a kind of terse, abbreviated writing which lacks depth and substance. I know I try to write well no matter what the medium — a postcard even — but how much am I leaving out by the lack of a journal discipline, and the total lack of what any literarily-minded person could call “letters”. The other day I received a long message — letter — from P.Z. about the birth and first month of his daughter’s life. It was wonderful. But I find myself missing the fat envelope, the anticipation of carrying something with real weight home from the post office and opening it up to find someone’s actual handwriting — written, no less, to ME. And I find myself somewhat ashamed and saddened to notice how quickly I have given it all up myself — and thus deprived my closest friends and family of the same pleasure.

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October 2

At lunch yesterday Mounir said, “Isn’t it odd, how when we get old we want things to be the way they were when we were children. I woke up in the night feeling too hot, and I started thinking about how in Syria we used to sleep under just one cover — it was a padded thing — what do you call it? — right, a quilt, and under it there would be a sheet and on top of it a very thin layer of cloth. When they wanted to wash it they took it apart — it was sewn on the edges — and washed it. I can see my mother spreading it out on the floor — on the rug — with the sheet underneath and this other material on top, and then we would all help by getting around the edges and taking a big needle and sewing the layers together on the edges. Funny how you think of these things.”

October 3

Cold, grey and rainy today. By contrast, yesterday was brilliantly blue with the fall colors just starting toward their peak. In the afternoon the skies became that heavy leaden color and the trees stood out even more against it. Jonathan went skiing.

October 19

News of the world: a Vermont woman who has crusaded against land mines won the Nobel Peace Prize. Clinton is being investigated ad nauseam for his fund-raising practices. It just came out that John Kennedy negotiated a deal with Khrushchev to end the Cuban missile crisis - our missiles in Turkey for theirs in Cuba. Only seven people knew, and not one of them told. Orel Hershiser lost the first game of the World Series (we didn’t watch).

After several nights of frost, the trees have lost their brilliance and the hillsides have all become of a piece again — that muted late-fall tapestry I like so much. Walking across the bridge this afternoon I noticed the dusty blue stems of one of the swamp trees — I don’t know its name — and that they were the same color as the water and the sky. When you rub the stems they become dark maroon under the silvery blue.

The Blank Page - and some November fields

 

The only way to get over the fear of the blank page is to encounter lots of them. The first page of a new sketchbook is always the hardest, but the subsequent ones get easier. I’ve started on a project of painting twenty 11 1/2” x 15” watercolor sheets. That’s five large sheets of Arches cold press, cut into quarters. I’m hoping that by the time I’ve worked through all of them, I’ll have learned some new things, and possibly had a breakthrough.

Above is a sheet that’s been soaked with water and then taped to my desk with masking tape. I run a sponge around the edges first to dry them a bit, and then apply the tape, pressing it down again and again over the succeeding minutes until it adheres well. This is to minimize the buckling of the wet paper as it dries, and the stretching also allows for the addition of wet washes or re-dampening the sheet during the painting process.

 

The swatches at left are the palette I’ve chosen for this piece. Just six pigments: ultramarine blue, quinacridone burnt orange, yellow ochre, hansa yellow, sap green, buff titanium. The blue and orange mix together to form many colors, from dark blue to a range of browns and greys, perfect for the November fields and woods that are the subject of this picture.

While the paper is still wet, the first washes need to go down - but if it’s too wet, they’ll run into each other. Sometimes you want that, sometimes not. I painted the ochre fields and a background for the woods first.

 

The sky had an initial blue wash, leaving the clouds white, and then as the paper dried I further defined the sky/cloud edges and added some grey shadows in the lower parts of the clouds.

 

The middle of the paper is still damp here, allowing me to create softness in the hedgerow and the shadows on the field. The woods were drier when I put the dark trees in, and I went back with a sea sponge to blot out the bits of field showing through them and soften the tops of the trees.

The foreground trees couldn’t be painted until the field area was drier. I’m still learning how to judge what will happen when I put my brush onto the paper, and the exact moment when I should do that. The result depends not only on how damp the paper is, but also how wet or thick the pigment is that I’ve loaded onto the brush, and whether that particular pigment is opaque or transparent.

 

The calibration between all these variables is very tricky, and only experience with specific materials, as well as years of practice, add up to judgement. On the other hand, it’s often speed and unexpected events that give watercolor its spontaneity and vibrancy, so being too careful is a detriment. That’s the Zen quality I want to aim for in this most difficult medium — having such a mastery of the technical aspects that I don’t have to think about them, and can let go. I’m not there yet, but hopeful that this project will result in progress.

 

I had a hard time photographing the final painting — the image above is too contrast-y, and the colors are washed out, but when I adjusted those parameters during editing, I couldn’t achieve a good balance. This detail shows the subtlety a little better:

 

In the end, there are things I like here, and things I don’t — the painting does get across the colors and mood of the rural northeast in these last days of November, but it’s too detailed. No fussing or second thoughts, though: I’m just going to move on to the next blank sheet and make another painting. This is only number 3!

It’s easy to imagine a flock of wild turkeys on these fields. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends!

Simplicity, in life and in death

 

 

Landscape on I-88 near Nineveh, NY. Pencil drawing in sketchbook.

 

On Monday, we drove down to Binghamton, New York, to attend a family funeral the following morning. My Aunt Doris was the wife of my father’s eldest brother, the Rev. F. Porter Adams. Porter died suddenly in his early 60s, forty years ago, and yet Doris continued in good health, living independently until she was 94, and dying last week at 98. Like his father, my paternal grandfather, Porter was a Methodist minister, and so is his daughter Nancy. He and Doris were married in 1952. I remember her as a devoted mother to her children and the embodiment of the perfect minister’s wife, always at her husband’s side and involved with their church communities. After he died she was an equally caring mother and helper for her adult children and grand daughters. She was a homemaker, a good baker, cook, and seamstress, with a strong Christian faith; she was always kind to me, and I never remember her being annoyed, complaining, or saying a cross word to anyone. I realized, sitting at the service, that -- outside of these roles, which were also the subject of the sermon and the family reminiscences — I had barely known her at all.

Or then again, perhaps I had. Perhaps the way she was remembered and described at the funeral was exactly who she was, and that her choice had been just that: to live a simple, modest, selfless life, expressing her faith through devotedly caring for her family and community. It must have been terrible to lose her husband so suddenly and unexpectedly, just when he was looking forward to retirement, but somehow she managed not only to go on, but to find meaning and purpose in the many decades that remained. Not only had she been loving and faithful, she must have also been quite strong, and have had the support of good friends in addition to her children and her siblings.

The funeral was simple, straightforward, and heartfelt. Old favorite Methodist hymns played on a piano, stories shared by her family and the chaplain at the nursing home where she had lived for the past four years, a brief eulogy by the pastor of the church, a duet sung by those two women - the chaplain and pastor - followed by prayers of commendation. I was glad there was a lot of music, because it’s a tradition on my father’s side of the family. When they were young, my dad, his sister, and his two brothers had often sung as a quartet at church services led by their own father, and later on my grandmother always insisted that we all stand around the piano and sing together at family gatherings. I grew up playing those Methodist hymns at the piano while my father sang, in his clear tenor voice, and I could hear him next to me, in my mind, on Tuesday morning.

In addition to being there for my cousins, who have always supported me at such events, I’d wanted to acknowledge the passing of my aunt as the last of my parents’ generation. The eldest on both sides of my family is now...me. It’s a sobering thought, and it has come late, mainly because many of them lived very long lives.

 

Landscape on I-88 near Nineveh, NY. Pencil drawing in sketchbook.

The drive back to Montreal was long -- more than six hours, not counting stops — but the weather was good and we took turns driving. The first stretch, on I-88 from Binghamton to Oneonta and then to Albany, passes through what feels like home terrain to me, and near towns where my grandparents and father, and later, friends of my own once lived: Nimmonsburg, Afton, Bainbridge, Sydney Center, Nineveh, Otego.

Jonathan drove the first stretch, and I looked out the window, taking photos of the landscape I love and making these two fast pencil sketches, while I thought about my aunt’s life, so different from my own. I also replayed the service we’d attended, fixing it in my memory. Such simplicity! It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to the grand liturgical events at the Anglican Cathedral we attend and where, as a choir member, I was part of the presentation for so many years. I had loved this very Protestant service, though, and felt comfortable in it — partly because it reminded me of where I came from, and mainly because it was utterly sincere. Anglican liturgy gives structure, dignity, solemnity, and a progression of mood and intention throughout a service; the language is poetic, and music provides meditation, participatory moments, and enhances the mood of the readings, the time of year, the occasion. The words and service used at a royal funeral are almost the same as those for the funeral of any Anglican, anywhere in the world. But there is a lot to be said for the directness, familiarity, sincerity, and simplicity of what we had just witnessed. It suited my aunt perfectly, and perhaps some of that feeling came across in the simple drawings I did later that day.

 

Near Unadilla, NY. Watercolor, 5.5” x 8” in sketchbook.

Today, though, I’m back in my own home. That peaceful landscape of fields and gently rolling hills continues to call to me, so I did a quick watercolor in my sketchbook, hopefully bringing the muted colors of November to life for you. There will be more to come.

Covid Finally Catches Me...and Forces Me to Think.

After 4 1/2 years of dodging the inevitable, I was still surprised to see the pale red line forming on the test kit. I had thought I was coming down with a cold, but it rapidly seemed rather worse than that, so I tested… and less than 24 hours later, my husband also tested positive. The next few days were not pleasant: a foggy blur of aches and fever, staring off into space, and deep exhaustion along with coughing and congestion. We’re coming out of the worst of it now, with the help of recent vaccinations, Paxlovid, and a lot of sleep.

It was perhaps a fitting time: our illness coinciding not only with the surreal run-up to the American election but my own re-reading of The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann’s epic novel, published exactly 100 years ago, is about tuberculosis patients in the rarified confines of a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps during the years just before the outbreak of the first World War.

Canada is not as removed from U.S. reality in 2024 as a snowy mountaintop was from the political machinations of Europe a century ago — modern media has made sure of that -- but it does feel one long step away. I voted several weeks ago, in Vermont, but most of my Canadian friends are only able to anxiously await the results from a country they once thought they understood, but which has become increasingly incomprehensible. When they ask me, “How is it even possible that this man might win?” I hardly know where to begin.

I’ve been reflecting not only on the election and its potential ramifications, but on the pandemic which is offically “over” even though there’s a major wave of infection in my city, and perhaps in yours too. Capitalism is always ready to seize the opportunity. In the U.S., the anti-viral treatment Paxlovid stopped being free when the COVID emergency was declared over; now a five-day course of treatment costs $1400, which is covered by some but not all insurance carriers. Medicare will cover it for most seniors through the end of December 2024; after that, who knows? Here, the treatment is covered by the province of Quebec with a small co-pay if you meet certain criteria (such as being over 60) but it sounds like hardly anyone even asks for it. Vaccinations are still free in Canada, but uptake is low. Basically, people just don’t want to think about it anymore.

As I was getting sicker, feeling the virus taking hold in my body, I remembered the fear of the early days of 2020, when we had no treatments whatsoever, when we were washing and wiping everything that came into our houses, and, on the news, seeing morgues filling with bodies. I thought about the people I knew personally who succumbed to the disease. I felt immense gratitude to the medical community of researchers and providers who risked so much and worked so hard to save lives. And I wondered how long it will be before we are willing to look back and see this period of time clearly.

In Mann’s book, illness is both an everyday reality and a metaphor. The residents of the sanitarium, who have come from many different Western and Eastern European countries and from Russia, are preoccupied with their health but also with triviality and pleasure. They eat five sumptuous meals each day and live in luxurious, hotel-like surroundings, completely removed from their previous lives and responsibilities, whether career or familial. They dress up, play games, wander in the mountains, gossip endlessly, drink and smoke, and take their rest cures wrapped in fur robes. When someone’s disease progresses to “the horizontal state”, they are confined to bed and disappear from view. Meanwhile, down below, Europe edges toward war. Two of the patients, the Italian humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit champion of traditionalism and authority, Naptha, have removed themselves from the sanitarium to live out their days in the neighboring town, and there they engage in philosophical debates about the great questions facing civilization and every human being. They battle for the mind of the young, unformed protagonist, Hans Castorp, who, before starting his planned engineering career, had visited his cousin at the sanitorium and taken up, after a somewhat dubious diagnosis, permanent residence there himself.

Mann’s book shows us human beings as primarily short-sighted and self-interested, drawn to the pursuit of pleasure and superficialities, and prone to ignoring and forgetting the lessons of recent experience — but also looks at other possibilities of how to live one’s life.

He began The Magic Mountain before the war, after visiting his own wife while she was a patient in a Davos sanitarium. He put the manuscript — originally intended as a short story! - aside and finished it after the war. His book was widely read and talked about at the time, and it has a lasting reputation as one of the greatest novels ever written. Today, not only do we seem to want to forget a worldwide catastrophe as devastating as the pandemic, and pretend it doesn’t still exist, we certainly do not want to read literature about it. As democracy is eroded by far-right ideologies and billionaire fortunes, as fascism arrives on our very doorstep, and war rains down on other people’s heads, we can still easily spend much of our time scrolling, shopping, and being entertained.

It’s taken me a while to read Mann’s long book, for the second time in my life, and it struck me with the force of truth much more than when I was young; I’ve seen a lot more of life by now. If someone writes a definitive novel about our own time, I wonder how widely it will be read, and by whom — both in the coming years, and 100 years from now. However, when the overriding question of the present day is, “How did we get here?”, it seems worthwhile for each of us to grasp that moment and give it some thought, as individuals who are living through a pivotal time in history.

Glorious Golden Days

 

Without the frequent trips to central New York that we’ve been taking over the past two and a half years, J. and I knew we needed to make an effort this fall to get out of the city and experience the beauty of this extraordinary season in the Northeast. Last weekend we drove down into the Adirondacks, where we had a picnic by a remote, rushing stream, visited a friend’s house on a quiet lake, and meandered on the back roads of upstate New York and Quebec where the fall color was at its peak.

Yesterday we took a trip to the Morgan Arboretum (video above), a large managed forest preserve owned and maintained by McGill University on the western part of Montreal island. We hiked five and a half miles of leaf-covered trails through maple, beech, ash and basswood forests, and across the tall, blowing grasses of wide-open fields, returning home happy, tired, and feeling like we had been very far away from our urban existence even though the preserve is only about 20 minutes from home. In both of these places, I took reference pictures that I hope will inspire some artwork later on.

When I was a child, we’d often have snow flurries by late October, and I would have been wearing wool for weeks. Our unseasonably warm weather is clearly a result of climate change, and that distressing thought hasn’t been far from my mind, even as I’ve enjoyed this extended season. In the last few days the weather here finally turned colder. I brought the plants in from the balcony a few days ago, threw out the annuals, and did some severe pruning on almost everything that was coming inside.

 

Right now it’s sunny, but a fierce wind is beating against my studio windows. The weather is more volatile and violent than I ever remember. It scares me to think about the state of even the best-managed forest, fifty years from now. I feel privileged to have lived most of my life appreciating and being comfortable in nature, and hope I haven’t ever taken it for granted. This was a major factor in my voting, and may be in yours, too, although I have no illusions about either party’s commitment to the level of significant change that’s necessary.

Those of us who care should do everything we can to raise awareness of the natural world. I feel like a relic of some long-lost era, as someone who knows the names of ferns, mosses, flowering plants and trees as well as wild living creatures, who’s comfortable in the woods and mountains, able to walk and sit quietly without disturbing the inhabitants, and knows something about foraging as well as how to grow her own food. Our remoteness from the natural world, and our blithe subjugation and overuse of it, mirrors what we’ve done to indigenous people; if there’s anything that could be called “original sin,” surely this is it.

A recommendation: Erik Rittenberry, who curates the fine Substack blog “Poetic Outlaws”, recently spent a week alone in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where I too have spent a lot of time. I think you’ll appreciate his post about wilderness solitude, accompanied by quotes from poets and essayists from Rilke and Hesse to Snyder and Kerouac, and his own gorgeous photographs of the mountains ablaze with autumn color. He writes:

I came to the mountains not merely as an escape but as a pilgrimage of sorts—a communion with nature that helps rid the distractions of daily life. I wanted to be left alone with my thoughts, my breath, and the slow turning of the seasons.

In solitude, you find clarity. In the words of Rollo May: “In order to be open to creativity, one must have the capacity for constructive use of solitude. One must overcome the fear of being alone.”

 

Making a Print

Take a three-minute break from your day, and make a print with me...

I had thought of doing a voiceover for this short video, but then decided it would be more meditative without an audio explanation - and with all that's going on in our fraught world, we need moments when we can step back.

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Since moving to our new home two years ago and closing our studio, I haven't done any printmaking. I've missed it. Needing to make some new prints for blog subscribers was the incentive I needed to get out the printing materials and figure out how to set up in this new space. Once I had things organized and had made some test prints, I thought of making a video of the process for the blog.

The first step is rolling out the ink on a glass or plexiglass sheet, using a rubber roller known as a brayer. In rolling, you're changing the consistency and tackiness of the ink. You can't print with it as it comes out of the tube - the ink would just slide around, and it wouldn't hold any fine detail. The rolling process changes that as the ink film becomes thinner and thinner on the glass. It's difficult to describe how to know when it's ready; I sense it both by what I see in the pattern of the rolled ink as it leaves the brayer, and by the sound the brayer makes when the ink reaches the proper consistency. (In the video, the ink has alteady been rolled out for several minutes; all I'm doing is coating the brayer.)

Then we're ready to ink the carved relief block. In this case, it's a linocut - this one was an illustration for Dave Bonta's Ice Mountain: An Elegy that I illustrated and published through Phoenicia Publishing back in 2016. You have to keep the brayer absolutely flat, and make sure every little bit of carved surface has a thin coat of ink, but that you haven't smudged any onto the background, which is easy to do. A few little marks will always come through when hand-printing, and that's part of the beauty of the process. However, we don't want smudges, unclear lines and corners, or inconsistent coverage in the solid areas.

Enlarged view of the relief block from a low angle -- the difference between the carved and uncarved surfaces is less than 1/16 of an inch.

Each relief block is different, and each has its own challenges - areas that don't want to print cleanly, tight details that tend to fill up, or large dark areas that don't print solidly unless careful attention is paid. We only learn each block's idiosyncracies by making test prints, seeing what happens, and adjusting.

A thin sheet of Japanese paper -- here I'm using a handmade sheet, made from a plant fiber called kozu -- is placed carefully on the block. I've marked pencil lines on the masking tape around the block to help me position the paper where I want it to be. Then I use my fingers to lightly stick the paper to the block. The transfer of ink begins with the use of a baren - mine is an inexpensive Japanese baren, made from a plastic disk covered with bamboo. Because it's flat, it glides evenly along the surface of the block, transferring ink to the paper.

Some people only use a baren, but I've never felt it did the job completely. So I use it to do an initial pass, and then finish the print using a wooden spoon. I've used this particular spoon for probably thirty years! It gives me the ability to change the angle and pressure, depending on what sort of area I'm working on. For a sharp, detailed section like the eye, or the ridges on the back of the frog, I use the front of the spoon and a smaller, more pointed stroke, while for a large flat solid area, I use the bowl of the spoon and a more circular stroke to get consistent coverage of ink onto the paper.

Once the print is finished, it will be barely stuck to the block, and you should be able to remove it easily. If the ink was too thick or not tacky enough, it can slide on the block and create a smudged image. If it's too thick or too runny, the details will be lost. If the ink dries too fast, as water-based inks tend to do, they may not soak into the paper well enough at all. But some oil-based inks don't dry fast enough, and you'll find an oily halo on the edges of each inked line. Each type of paper also affects the printing process, because it takes the ink differently. There are a lot of variables, and only experience can help us learn how to manage them. I now use Caligo Safe Wash inks, which are oil-based, but clean up with water.

Then the prints go on a closeline or a rack to dry - they're ready to handle in about 36-48 hours. Once I've taken them off the line, I inspect them carefully - out of this batch of 8 prints, I rejected two, as well as the initial two test prints. The accepted prints are then numbered and signed.

Although I work in many media, I sometimes think printmaking is the most satisfying. There's something both elemental and almost magical about rubbing the back of the paper and seeing the image emerge - human beings have been doing similar things ever since the first artist painted their own hand and pressed it against the wall of a cave. I also love the ability to make copies of a work of art that are neither photographic nor digital, and not mechanical in any way; each one is its own small, slightly unique entity, on a carefully-made piece of paper that feels natural and of the earth.